SpongeBob SquarePants vs Popeye the Sailor Man (Nickelodeon vs Thimble Theatre)

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“Ocean man, take me by the hand, lead me to the land that you understand” - Ween

SpongeBob Squarepants, Nickelodeon’s famous sponge of Bikini Bottom!

Popeye, Thimble Theatre’s sailor man who loves his spinach cans!

Are you ready readers? Ready for some nautical nonsense? No one is more familiar with complete utter nonsense like these two iconic and aquatic-based cartoon characters. Despite their long-standing legacies however, they live surprisingly simple and varied lives, often fighting for the people they love and proving to themselves that they are true ocean warriors. Put on your sailor hats and get your fill of patties and spinach in as we will ask the most important questions: could Nickelodeon’s mascot prove to be too much for Popeye or could the one-eyed sailor send SpongeBob to a fate worse than Shell City? Only one way to find out…

Before we get started…

You may be wondering why I hadn’t announced this blog at the end of the last one. Well, I’ll quickly clarify why that ended up being the case. I had always found this matchup interesting for a blog and I wanted to have some fun looking through these two and actually finding a winner this time around. This blog’s been chipped away at in the background ever since Genie vs Beetlejuice and I chose to keep this hidden as I wanted it to be a surprise blog of mine. Granted, it took as long as it did because there were some pretty big bumps in the road, especially when the person I was working on this blog ended up having to dip halfway through production. On their behalf, they’ll remain anonymous per their request (note that they are not credited anywhere in this blog as they also requested that I didn’t credit them) but personal matters forced them to delete their entire internet presence. Oddly enough, they chose to not delete their Popeyes notes doc but they instead revoked my access to their doc. As frustrating as it was, I could no longer get in contact with them so Popeye’s side essentially had to restart from square zero and I almost gave up on this blog. Thankfully, I would later find out about an excellent versus page on Popeye by Denim Valentine. A massive shoutout goes to him as the page provided the majority of the scans that are used on Popeye’s end of the blog, plus I had almost missed a bunch of stuff from the overseas comics but the scans would also be there. If the Denim Valentine person ever reads this, I can’t emphasize enough that your page saved this blog so thanks!

Now, to set some ground rules. It ultimately won’t matter on where we set this fight as both SpongeBob and Popeye have the capability to fight outside of their usual battlegrounds. Almost every potential object in their arsenal will be given to them as they can both pull out anything at any time. The only items that we are not including are ones that are non-standard and require a different character’s presence to get ahold of; eg, SpongeBob won’t get the blue jelly of the blue jellyfish. SpongeBob’s side specifically will not prioritize items from the crossover games nor will it give him items from other series. For example, SpongeBob could technically get the Time Medallion from Nickelodeon All Star Brawl 2 but it is not only given to him by Clockwork, a character from Danny Phantom, but it requires Clockwork to actively reverse time in order for it to be effective. Likewise, any items/perks based on other franchises in the NASB and kart games will also be of low priority as it is unlikely for SpongeBob to use them in a general fight. It’s not like the majority of items change the verdict anyhow. On that note, support will only be limited to whoever they can summon and whoever isn’t a major character in their shows. For example, Gary is never really included with SpongeBob’s support in these debates despite being a pet of his. Similarly, we wouldn’t include Eugene the Jeep with Popeye’s support as he’s his own character that is separate from Popeye. It’ll only cover what would be “standard” support for them.

Speed will also be handled differently to other blogs here. Instead of trying to categorize non-finite speed feats with infinite and immeasurable, they will be put under the umbrella of inaccessible. I know that they all have separate definitions by technicality, I know that the versus mindset is that immeasurable > infinite but it’s a whole bunch of semantics really. They are practically the same thing and making any distinction between the two doesn’t really mean anything worthwhile. I know that I’ve done this myself but my standards have changed since then and thus I’m categorizing non-finite speeds as inaccessible. Disagree with the wall if you really want to.

ALSO, LAST IMPORTANT NOTE. There’s a good amount of Popeye’s material that features inappropriate and racist portrayals of certain ethnicities, cultures, and the like. Some links/gifs may feature said material so if you don’t wish to see them, then be wary as you read.

Media List

Despite how extensive both of their media is, mainly due to the fact that it’s delved into all sorts of genres all over the years, the media we will use for both is pretty straightforward.

On SpongeBob’s end, everything from the main shows to video games to comics to basically everything else is on the table. It only has to be official to count. We’ll even use the Nickelodeon crossover event games for SpongeBob’s side of the analysis. Popeye’s end is also considering every official piece of media for the analysis but we also need to clarify something. Covering Popeye in full essentially means soft compositing Popeye as a whole as each iteration of Popeye is treated as its own separate universe (comics am I right). Greater elaboration will be made later in Before the Verdict but it’s important to note this when looking at Popeye in the future. Given that we’re also soft compositing SpongeBob, this shouldn’t be an issue however.

For SpongeBob, we will be using…

  • The SpongeBob Squarepants show
  • The Patrick Star show
  • Kamp Koral
  • Every SpongeBob comic
  • Every SpongeBob-focused video game
  • Nickelodeon crossover games
  • The hit Broadway musical

For Popeye, we will be using…

  • Popeye’s comic strip appearances
  • The Fleischer/Famous Studios shorts
  • Braccio di Ferro
  • Every official Popeye cartoon
  • IDW Popeye Comics
  • The live action movie
  • Every official Popeye video game
  • Eye Lie Popeye

Background

“I'm ready, I'm ready, I'm ready!”

Is nautical nonsense something you wish? Well, if the oceans aren’t enough craziness for you then perhaps dropping 23 nukes onto one specific atoll may bring about something more. In times of war between the west and east, the United States would have ended up creating the nuclear bomb, using the locale of Bikini Atoll to test out their strongest nukes. It is believed that the high amounts of radiation from these bomb tests ended up shifting the very aquatic life that laid beneath the atoll, creating a civilization that is otherwise known as Bikini Bottom. While it is simply one theory of many regarding Bikini Bottom’s origins (this show really loves to contradict its own history), it will always be known as the hometown for everyone’s favorite sponge… SpongeBob Squarepants!

To put it simply, SpongeBob is the kind of guy who would live in a pineapple under the sea. His life may not be the most eventful but he’ll always find himself smiling that big ol’ grin each and every day. There may not be much to note with his childhood or his life in general as he was growing up but that isn’t to say that he never found his pride in himself. After proving his worth as a dedicated employee of the Krusty Krab, SpongeBob would spend his days working away at his minimum wage job to satisfy the people of Bikini Bottom (and Mr. Krabs’ pockets of course) with his freshly grilled Krabby patties. Once he’s off the job for the day, he’ll head on home and tend to his beloved pet snail Gary. Of course, life is never that simple when you have neighbors like the dopey Patrick, the grumpy Squidward, the clever Sandy Cheeks, and plenty of other strange creatures. SpongeBob always finds himself involved in some sort of misadventure, whether it’d be protecting the Krabby Patty secret formula from that wicked Plankton, finding himself involved with the gods of his world, or simply goofing off with Patrick while also pissing off Squidward in the process. Nothing is truly impossible when you have someone like SpongeBob around.

This isn’t to say that SpongeBob’s never had his low points or has ever been safe from remarks of how childish and naive he can be half the time. His relationship with Bikini Bottom is about as episodic as the show itself but in times where it mattered most, SpongeBob would have to prove to himself and the rest of Bikini Bottom that he can be relied on. Sure, he may go overboard sometimes and act without as much of a thought in his brain but it’s all in the name of his good intentions. By the supposed end of his story, SpongeBob would prove that his kid-like nature never held him back and instead made him stronger, allowing him to finally earn the manager position of the Krusty Krab 2. All's well that ends well… except for the 13 seasons that came after the first movie. I don’t think I can even fit the spinoffs into SpongeBob’s story when they’re casually break everything we’ve come to know about SpongeBob… fuck.

“I'm strong to the finich, 'cause I eats me spinach, I'm Popeye the Sailor Man!”

Have you ever wondered what makes a sailor fit for life on the seas? Would it be the devastating but world-changing experiences of war? Would it be the nutritious greens of ancient Persia? Or was it perhaps a bit of cheeky good luck on their side? Well, what if I told you that there was a certain sailor who was gifted all three and became one of the most battle-hardened sailors in his entire world? That’s right, who else could it be besides Popeye the sailor man himself!

For as well-renowned of a sailor that Popeye is, his origins are anything but. His birth would see him almost engulfed by the rough waves of the seas but as the newfound son of Poopdeck Pappy and an unknown mother, it wouldn’t be long before his parents chose to ditch him. Now left at an orphanage, he only had a pipe to remember his dad by and he would choose to not engage in any fight until the age of 4. Wanting to give the orphanage keeper a taste of his own medicine, he would accidentally impress them in the process and become a prized child that would be signed up for all sorts of contests. None of this really gave Popeye joy in life and given enough time, Popeye would take to the streets wearing only flour bags for clothes. It seemed like life wasn’t going upwards for him but his luck would kick in as he would meet a sailor that gave him a second chance at life: Whaler Joe.

With this newfound path of life ahead of him, there was only one thing that Popeye could learn how to do: fight. Popeye would continuously train his body in order to take on potential threats, and once he accidentally stumbled upon his future ship, he would truly discover his love for sailing and fighting. His first voyage would see him lose an eye but he would manage to come out on top, soon joining the navy to aid in the war against other countries of his world. Not only would he meet his long-standing rival of Bluto but he would later make a trip to Dice Island and meet the very woman who would become his wife: Olive Oyl. Shenanigans would occur as Popeye had to get involved with the powers of the Whiffle Hen but their relationship would build up over time. They may have hated each other at first but soon enough, they would find themselves deeply enamored by the other. Olive would abandon her previous fiancee of Ham Gravy and choose to pursue her true love of Popeye; ever since then, these two have forever remained in love and are willing to go through thick and thin for each other. They would even end up adopting a baby known as Sweet Pea, creating a proper family that Popeye would be willing to protect for the rest of his life.

From this point on, the tale becomes a lot more long-winded and episodic. Popeye’s gone on many adventures over the seas but he’s also had plenty of in-land adventures alongside them. Whether he is butting heads with Bluto/Brutus for Olive’s attention, protecting his loved ones from the dangers of their world, or having fun with his friends or family, Popeye’s life is never dull.

Experience and Skill

SpongeBob is, and always will be, a goofball whose intelligence heavily fluctuates between every episode. However, you’d be mistaken to underestimate him. This little sponge is talented in all sorts of areas, most notably in his cooking skills while he is under the Krusty Krab. He is the only being capable of making Krabby Patties as tasty as they are in such quick succession. Even when he has to face hordes of anchovies, Krabby-Patty making machines that were meant to replace his job, and the mass production of Krabby Patties by a singular King Neptune, SpongeBob’s cooking can overcome it all. He has been cooking ever since he was an infant after all but that isn’t close to his only area of expertise. After all, SpongeBob is the kind who prefers to be ready for just about anything.

Through many years of trial and error, SpongeBob has managed to perfect both his bubble-making abilities and his jellyfish catching skills to the point of outclassing everyone around him, the former of which has allowed him to create entire towns made up of bubbles and the latter of which allowed him to capture every intelligent jellyfish of Jellyfish Fields with little issue. He also seems to be a surprisingly brilliant inventor as he’s made plenty of his own devices like machines that shoot bottles to the ocean’s surface, a device that was meant to impress a bunch of English chimpanzees, and the efficient cleaning machine “The Spot Master 6000”. For some reason, SpongeBob has even been shown to have a secret lab within his house where he can run any experiment he wants. Even when he only has random scrap within his vicinity, he can make machines as complex as tanks and rocket ships out of them. Alongside all that, he’s also learnt how to do surgery, is well versed in music making, can somehow renovate small spaces into entire dimensions, can create multiple complex traps, is actually a good driver when it isn’t a boat, and he generally has some decent fighting skills.

He’s not only well-versed in karate to the point of keeping up with Sandy (more on that later) but throughout the many years that he’s thwarted Plankton’s plans, SpongeBob’s become a lot trickier in battle. He isn’t afraid to use opportunities and weaknesses when necessary, plus he’s got additional experience from the numerous bosses that he’s had to fight in his games. All of this is to say that he absolutely deserves the packed award closet that he has.

In the 97 years that Popeye’s been around in our world, this sailor is nothing more than a seasoned adventurer and exceptional fighter at heart. Even when he was just a wee lad, he would already have the basics of brawling down, continuing to sharpen his fisticuffs against the likes of bullies. His involvement with the Coast Guard and the Navy would prepare him for all kinds of future battles, especially when he constantly has to fight against the likes of Bluto, the Sea Hag, literal gods, or whatever other extraterrestrial threat exists in his world. As someone who spent years of life traversing the seas and treasure hunting, Popeye is also someone who is very familiar with the sailor life.

In any case, Popeye is a genius when it comes to fighting and deceiving. He’s become especially talented with the likes of both boxing and wrestling, often throwing hands against experienced fighters like himself. Sometimes, Popeye’s so confident in his boxing skill that he’ll tend to mess with his opponents before going for the finishing blow. If Popeye is ever overwhelmed numbers-wise, he can still hold his own ground, plus he’s used his on-the-fly thinking to deal with foes that were practically invulnerable to his punches. Popeye’s also an acrobatic at heart and he has an especially good aiming arm. At times, his aim could be so good that it may just look like sheer lucky moments and his precision is scarily high. For instance, Popeye would manage to detach a cannon from one of his ships and use it to shoot down battleships and planes as if it were a gun. Those battle-smarts also go a long way in letting Popeye escape tricky situations and it enables him to defeat all sorts of foes with their own array of gimmicks. Tall giants, magical ladies with water barriers, and advanced robots that act just like him are no match for this beast.

If Popeye isn’t trying to throw hands with you, he can deceive you into doing silly things… sometimes in the name of landing a punch in. Switching fists at the last moment for a surprise attack, confusing monsters with philosophy, or just confusing the heck out of Brutus in general are some ways in which Popeye’s more brains over brawn. The number of disguises that Popeye’s used has also been pretty useful in more than one instance. Outside of fights, Popeye’s also showcased a wide variety of skills such as building, piloting, cutting hair, magic, playing music, and stage performing (according to Thimble Theater). The only thing that Popeye couldn’t be is a mathematician as he never attended proper school. Shame. Maybe spinach could fix that since eating spinach can greatly improve Popeye’s fighting skill alongside his physicals, completing him as an absolute unit in battle. Finally, as more of a side note than a relevant advantage in a fight, Popeye’s influence can be… questionable at times but he’s inspired plenty of children before and usually gets his way when he stubbornly refuses to back down. He’s convinced others to eat spinach, quieted down traffic by yelling at it, successfully made all of the surrounding wilderness quiet down when he yelled at them, and influenced the world into buying a brand of cereal just because he endorsed it (only to later expose it as a scam and cause people to kill themselves over it). All things considered, Popeye is definitely quite the jack of all trades.

Arsenal

Spatulas

What good is an expert fry cook like SpongeBob without his trusty spatula? This is practically his go to tool when he’s in the kitchen and even out of the kitchen. Besides using it to cook his delectable Krabby Patties, SpongeBob has used it as a melee weapon that allows him to swordfight or he can simply throw it like a boomerang to grab items from afar. He doesn’t just have one spatula however, he’s gotten his hands on plenty over the years!

Spat/Flipper/Spatty/Fifi: The Ol’ Reliable (not the actual one) of SpongeBob’s spatula collection. It is basically your average spatula but with a few nifty features. It’s got a built-in ballpoint pen, a built-in key that lets SpongeBob access the ingredients in his pants, it has an astounding heat resistance, and it seems to have its own sentience. Oddly enough however, it seems to be capable of deflecting magic attacks as well.

Triple-Headed Spatula: Whether it’s an extension of Spat or a new spatula altogether is unclear but this spatula can extend its head over three times to flip three times the patties!

Hydro-Dynamic Spatula: Not to be confused with the last spatula, this spatula made its debut in the pilot episode as an advanced piece of tech capable of flight as well as three times the Krabby Patty production.

Golden Spatula: There have been plenty of golden spatulas that SpongeBob has gotten his hands on throughout the series. Plankton’s given him one, SpongeBob managed to pull King Neptune’s golden spatula from deep fryer grease (thus making him worthy), they are the main collectibles of Battle for Bikini Bottom, they can act as a makeshift defense similar to Sonic’s rings, it acts as a powerup that squishes all Planktons on screen in Patty Panic, it can boost SpongeBob’s strength and let him eliminate stronger ghosts in Titans of the Tide, that same game would show that it can reflect energy beams as strong as King Neptune’s and the Flying Dutchman’s combined,  and the spatula is able to cook up a Krabby Patty that can cure Mr. Krabs of “Greedious Crustaceanous Too Cheapus” in SpongeBob: Lights, Camera, Pants!

Majestic Sizzlemaster: An evil spatula that Plankton kindly “gifted” to SpongeBob. It’s able to talk, fly around by itself, activate a mode that lets it flip multiple patties at once, and it has the ability to smell objects. It’s unclear if SpongeBob kept this one.

Le Spatula: A futuristic spatula that SpongeBob sold everything for to get his hands on it. It can extend multiple heads, walk around on two legs, talk away, and attack characters with a giant metal fist. Due to its rude personality and disdain for “slop” like Krabby Patties, it simply ran off and SpongeBob would never see it again.

Bubble Spatula: It’s like a spatula… but it’s made of bubbles!

Giant Spatulas: For his super move in Underpants Slam, SpongeBob can summon a few giant spatulas and have them fly across the screen to deal damage to foes.

Krabby Patties

When it comes to cooking Krabby Patties, no one can ever do it like SpongeBob can. The Krusty Krab’s iconic menu item can be instantly cooked with the right ingredients but SpongeBob can also create them out of thin air in games like Atlantis Squarepants so he essentially has access to them at all times. They can be thrown or swatted as projectiles, eaten to regain health, negate mind control upon consumption, manipulate your emotions to make you extremely sad or happy, bring you back from the dead, allow you to stay the same age for centuries, and most impressively, they can pacify even the toughest of fish. Ultimately, eating one Krabby Patty is meant to make you want more but SpongeBob’s cooking is so good that it leaves you utterly addicted to the point of eating them to death or even exploding. Even if you hate Krabby Patties but take the tiniest bite out of a Krabby Patty, you’ll end up falling in love with them all the same. Most importantly, a single drop of Krabby Patty alone can greatly increase SpongeBob’s strength, doing so in a similar vein to a certain sailor man.

Emergency Krabby Patty: In times of desperation, SpongeBob can pull out a can that’s packed with Krabby Patties in order to make some quick meals. He’s even used its contents to power himself up like a certain spinach-eating sailor…

Pretty Patties: Multiple colorful patties that are basically the same as normal Krabby Patties except they change your color after consumption.

Nasty Patty: An especially gross version of a Krabby Patty that was meant to poison a health inspector that SpongeBob and Mr. Krabs believed to be fake.

Triple Tryptophan Turkey Krabby Patty: This Thanksgiving-themed Krabby Patty will immediately force a consumer into a temporary coma.

Golden Krabby Patty: A special kind of Krabby Patty that can make SpongeBob invulnerable for a short period of time. Given the circumstances of this strange walking patty however, it may not be accessible through standard means.

Krabby Patty Rifle: As the name suggests, this gun can be loaded with flaming Krabby Patties and lets SpongeBob continuously shoot out Krabby Patties down the mouths of hungry customers.

Krabby Patty Launcher: This device can continuously shoot out Krabby Patties to anyone who is dying to have one.

Chum

Believe it or not, SpongeBob has actually cooked his own version of chum before as he would do so to try and help with Mr. Krabs’ addiction to chum. It’s far from the real deal as it’s way more delicious than it has any right to be but it’s worth noting that one version of his chum made of “wishes and love” could temporarily turn Mr. Krabs into SpongeBob.

Employee Hat

The mandatory outfit for every worker of the Krusty Krab. SpongeBob also always keeps a brick of lead in his hat because that’s what every experienced worker should do.

Bubbles

When SpongeBob has the time to indulge in his hobbies, he’s always had a soft spot for blowing bubbles. He’ll always carry a bubble blowing kit and bubble wand that enables him to, wouldn’t you know it, blow bubbles. Due to his expertise in blowing however, SpongeBob is basically able to blow a bubble into any shape and size of his choosing, allowing him to turn simple bubbles into complicated. Bubble objects, bubble hands to grab targets, bubble armor to bash with, bubble animals, explosive bubbles, bubbles that act like bowling balls, bubble missiles, durable bubble platforms, larger bubble objects, bubble giants, potentially entire bubble structures such as entire bubble cities, and even his own bubble-made buddy Bubble Buddy!

Revenge of the Flying Dutchman’s Bubbles: Within the GBA port of the game, SpongeBob has access to other specific bubble types such as bouncy bubbles to jump off of, stronger bubbles that can destroy enemies and obstacles, and float bubbles that let SpongeBob float into the air.

Extra Strength Soap: This brand of bubble soap strengthens bubbles to the point of being unbreakable even against other characters like Patrick.

Super Bubbles: With this bubble mixture, SpongeBob could have his bubbles target specific people and trap them within, carrying them to his location soon after. It's also capable of carrying SpongeBob’s entire house out of the ocean and to Texas in a short time period.

Magic Bubble Soap: Having bought this special soap from Madame Kassandra, blowing this soap through a bubble wand can essentially allow any desired wish to come true. Whether it’d be turning Patrick into a balloon or resetting all of the game’s events to relive them, these bubbles are especially powerful. Making too many bubbles will cause things to get real messy however…

Jellyfishing Nets

The art of jellyfish catching requires the proper tool for the job so as an expert on the topic, SpongeBob’s always got a few nets on him.

Average Jellyfishing Net: A more common version of a jellyfishing net with a bamboo frame. It catches jellyfish and other small targets just fine but he can also throw those caught jellyfish at enemies, safely hang off of hooks, and glide over gaps.

Ol’ Reliable: The original jellyfishing net that has never failed SpongeBob. It’s got a golden frame and handle in its original appearance but it would be broken within the episode. Luckily, SpongeBob would upgrade it by getting a version that has titanium alloy netting, a carbon fiber handle, and a silicon grip.

Deluxe Jelly Slayer Composite Pro: A modern jellyfishing net that SpongeBob wanted to save for his best day ever.

Bubble Blowing Net: A jellyfishing net that a younger SpongeBob can also use to blow bubbles via blowing the handle. He used this to stop a creature’s rampage across Kamp Koral by blowing a big bubble inside of its body.

Reef/Coral Blower

A sort of leaf blower/vacuum cleaner that can blow away or suck up anything like clams, tons of sand, the designs on SpongeBob’s pineapple home, parts of Squidward’s house (which includes the holes that make up its windows) and even the entire ocean. Granted, it would blow up right after it sucked up all that water but it has its other uses such as shooting sea shells/starfish with enough strength to break up rock walls, knocking back enemies, and sucking up enemies’ projectiles to send them flying back in their direction.

SpongeBob has also gotten his hands on the Reef Blower 2500, an upgrade to the original Reef Blower that seemingly shares the same functions.

Karate Gear

Some foam gloves and a foam helmet that SpongeBob uses whenever he delves into martial arts. He’s even got foam shoes to go along with his set.

With a spiky metal version of his regular gloves, SpongeBob can attach them to surfaces and take them off to cause them to explode after a bit of time.

Lucky Tie Clip

A golden tie clip that brings about an astounding amount of good luck to whoever wears it. Upon clipping it to his tie, SpongeBob, all of his belongings, and surrounding destruction return back to a repaired state, and from that point on, SpongeBob will continue to witness a series of events that only bring good luck to him throughout the day. He can not only have any and all harm avoid him but it can even benefit him in ways that will make his day that much better. Nothing can absolutely go wrong… until he takes it off as he can easily be affected by bad luck once it’s not clipped onto him. Without the clip, he can experience a constant amount of bad luck that persists even when it was revealed that the clip was inside SpongeBob the whole time, with that bad luck only ending once the clip was put back on him.

Net Guns and Launchers

As the name suggests, these devices simply shoot nets to trap foes. SpongeBob and Patrick would use some to capture what they thought were “aliens”, they would use ionic net launchers to temporarily hold down alien jellyfish, and some nets are able to capture ghosts in Supersponge.

Sponge Dummy

SpongeBob always happens to carry around an oddly perfect replica of himself if he ever wants to leave a situation without being noticed. It’s been shown to freeze from time to time but it can also gain sentience for long enough to where it could go to prom with Pearl for a good few hours.

Pizza Box

This piece of cardboard somehow allows SpongeBob to glide over short distances.

The Call of the …

A special whistle that can summon legally distinct David Hasselhoff at any time. SpongeBob and Patrick would use this whistle in the PC Port of the SpongeBob movie game to travel back to Bikini Bottom.

Kelp Grow


Squidward’s special spray that is meant to bring withered kelp back to life. However, SpongeBob and Patrick would find all sorts of fun uses out of it when they would steal it from Squidward and run around town to spray everything they can find. If the spray hits anything else such as an object or someone’s body part, it will cause it to grow in size to an unknown degree.

Invisible Spray

It’s pretty self-explanatory really. Anything that is sprayed turns invisible and its effects are reversible if it gets doused in water.

Knockout Ray (Debatable)

Among all the gear that Sandy believes to be fit for spies, she has a knockout ray that can instantly put others to sleep by zapping them. While SpongeBob never uses the ray himself, he and Patrick did manage to steal it off of Sandy for a short amount of time.

Orb of Confusion

A strange orb that belongs to Mermaid Man. When activated, the device can emit a field of confusion that renders the brain functionality of anyone within the area moot. It may belong to Mermaid Man but SpongeBob has gotten a hold of the orb with special superhero gloves that protect him from its effects.

Time Travel Machine

Initially one of Plankton’s inventions, SpongeBob would steal it from him and use it to open portals in time in order to save his friends that were displaced throughout time.

Quickster Superhero Outfit

When SpongeBob temporarily became part of the Justice League of Super Acquaintances, SpongeBob would take up the mantle of the Quickster. The costume grants SpongeBob a speed boost that makes him fast enough to be unseen by the human eye.

Ectoplasmic Containment Flinger

This strange device allowed for SpongeBob to fight off the ghost mutiny on the Flying Dutchman’s ship. This device is notable due to the fact that it could strip away a ghost’s power before it is then sucked up and trapped inside.

Monster Controlling Staff

Monster Island Sandy (yes, specifically that Sandy) would entrust SpongeBob with a staff that can seemingly control all kinds of monsters.

Conch-Based Items

Keeping in line with the underwater world of SpongeBob, he’s gotten his hands on plenty of conch-shaped items.

Magic Conch Shell: SpongeBob’s version of an 8-Ball that can always give him useful advice when he pulls its string. It was only with the Magic Conch that both SpongeBob and Patrick were able to survive when they were stranded in Kelp Forest, going as far as to guide them to lucky events such as food being dropped from a plane and onto their location.

Conch Signal: At the beginning of the Yellow Avenger game, SpongeBob would use his conch signal to summon Mermaid Man to the scene. Unfortunately… it took a good few hours for him to arrive.

Stunning Conch: In Sea Monster Smoosh, SpongeBob can use this conch item to briefly stun all enemies on screen.

Anti-Ghost Weapons

Need to deal with pesky ghosts? Well, SpongeBob can handle the job just fine with some of his borrowed gear!

Ghost Repellant Flashlight: Installed with a special UV-based ghost repellant, shining this flashlight on any ghost causes them to be disintegrated into nothing.

Anti Ghost Gizmo: A device that can rid of ghosts “once and for all”. Sandy would lend it to him in order to deal with Bikini Bottom’s ghost invasion and just like the flashlight, it turns ghosts into nothing. It can not only shoot out smaller shots but its AOE can be increased to make sure that those shots land.

Relics

In the Clash of Triton flash game, SpongeBob’s gotten quite a few upgrades through the relics that he’s collected after defeating bosses.

Jelly Cannon: A sort of bazooka that launches 3 jellyfish at different directions to damage enemies.

Sardine’s Caller: A horn that summons two guards by SpongeBob’s side to aid in battle.

Shell Shield: A big ol’ shell-shaped shield that blocks incoming attacks.

The Stormhammer: A powerful hammer that summons a big lightning strike around SpongeBob.

Powerups

Magic Bubble Wand

Whenever SpongeBob and Patrick need to return back to Bikini Bottom with their lost friends, they can use the wand’s power to teleport them back instantly.

By the events of Titans of the Tide, the wand would have lost all its magic but it still proves useful when it comes to making bubbles.

Neutronic Moisture Sealer

Created by a certain boy genius, this special spray retains the moisture in SpongeBob’s body and thus gives SpongeBob the ability to breathe on land without issue.

Imagination Box

It may seem like an ordinary box, and it technically was given that SpongeBob ordered a normal TV just for the box, but with a little imagination, practically any scenario is achievable within its confines. SpongeBob and Patrick initially use the box to have some imaginary fun while Squidward was unable to see how its magic worked but in Squidiot Box, Squidward would accidentally trip into the imagination box and find himself stuck within the world that was inside the box the whole time. He would no longer be in the “real world” as he would be stuck in a place that embodies the user’s imagination. This may seem like a good thing but given that Squidward’s thoughts could be influenced by a worried SpongeBob and Patrick from outside of the box, he often found himself in more danger than not. Whether it was dealing with the dangers of the jungle, finding himself overwhelmed in a jazz club to the point of the box overheating, or finding himself trapped in the Doodle Dimension, a lot can easily go wrong.

Even in his attempt to break out by simply drawing an escape door, he lacked a strong enough imagination to actually leave the box as he instead trapped himself in his own fake reality. We know that it’s based on one’s imagination strength given that SpongeBob and Patrick have never had to deal with such an issue and they are much greater imaginers than Squidward.

Neptune’s Trident

This powerful weapon usually belongs to King Neptune but given that SpongeBob’s gotten his hands on it plenty of times throughout the show and other side material, it should be fair game for use. Such a weapon needs experience to utilize its full power and keep it under control but its basic capabilities should be accessible by any wielder. The trident can naturally negate magical barriers such as Triton’s magic shield and amp their users physical strength among other abilities such as flight, creating storms, shooting out lightning, shooting destructive beams of energy (?), shooting flames, shooting light beams, telekinesis that is capable of halting falling anchors, growing its user to whatever size they wish, bringing objects to life, flipping a target’s personality traits, transmutating a target, reverting broken objects back to a fixed state, and creating giant ice cream geysers that flooded Bikini Bottom. The only real downside would have to be that the trident’s personality can go haywire and attack on its own accord until Neptune gets ahold of it, meaning that SpongeBob will have absolutely no control over it eventually.

The Trident also turns SpongeBob into the equivalent of a Greek God. His body not only becomes chiseled but his punches can purify both buildings and people alike while also casually calling down lightning.

Magic Wand

After being ripped off by Mr. Magic and getting his hands on a magic kit, he would have access to a magic wand that seemingly had no magical abilities whatsoever. However, the end of the episode would show that SpongeBob was somehow able to turn Patrick into a jar of mayonnaise despite its supposed fakeness.

Magic Pencil

Dropped from the landlubbers above the sea, this regular pencil would become a magic pencil upon reaching Bikini Bottom. In the hands of SpongeBob, this pencil can draw objects into existence and even bring those drawings to life, most notably shown with the creation of that freaky dude. It has created portals between dimensions, turned SpongeBob’s drawings to Doodlebob’s side by drawing angry faces on them, and flipping it around allows SpongeBob to completely erase whatever the pencil’s eraser touches.

Dream Glasses

When SpongeBob needed to wake up Squidward from his deep sleep, he would go to his pal Nelson and get some dream glasses. Putting them on near someone who is sleeping allows the user to see and enter their dreams while they’re also visible to the one who’s sleeping.

Underwear

Underwear isn’t that special by itself but in the Battle for Bikini Bottom game, they essentially act as extra hits that SpongeBob can take before dying outright. With full upgrades, SpongeBob can have a maximum of 6 underwear on him at all times.

Eraser Gun

This eraser-shooting gun proves to be especially effective against evil doodles such as Doodle Bob and his Doodle minions as it completely erases them from existence.

Spot Master 6000

Presumably built by SpongeBob himself, this device can shoot out three different kinds of projectiles that are meant to eliminate the stains out of anything that it’s shot towards. It’s able to separately shoot out a microwave-powered particle beam, a high-pressure water stream, and some pieces of steel wool or all three options can be crossed together and fired at the same time to really get the job done. The device would be used on a plate with an especially strong stain but it would end up disintegrating upon being set to maximum power while also blowing up the Krusty Krab.

Whirly Brains

This toy isn’t for the faintest of heart as it requires its owner to directly attach the propeller hat to their brain before it then takes off and removes the brains and eyes of its user. By using a remote control, the flying brain can be controlled from a distance, and the main appeal of this toy is just to fly your brain while still being able to see. It does also have more niche uses such as allowing SpongeBob’s brain to squeeze through small spaces or utilizing its propellers to slice targets but if those brains are ever stolen and blinded, SpongeBob will be unable to see until he gets them back.

Sugar Squeeze

A homemade concoction of Narlene that is made up of the sugar from numerous candies. Upon drinking it, the drinker’s tongue turns a bright gold to signify that their body is now on an all-time sugar high. For a limited amount of time, it forces people to glow and act extremely hyper with no other way of stopping its effects… at least without Narlene’s Thunder Squeeze, a contraption that actively sucks the sugar squeeze back out of its consumer’s system.  Spitting out the sugar squeeze also somehow lets you create fireworks.

SpongeBob should have access to this given that he was given his very own jar of sugar squeeze as a gift.

Flying Dutchman’s Horn Pipe

This special horn was in the possession of Mr. Krabs before SpongeBob then sneaked into his secret room and found it. Blowing this horn allows SpongeBob to summon the Flying Dutchman and his crew no matter where he is, opening a portal that will allow the Flying Dutchman to enter the area. Whether the Flying Dutchman wishes to help SpongeBob or if SpongeBob would even use it is up for debate given what occurred in the Search for Squarepants movie but it is there.

Head-Shrinking Potion

A concoction that was meant to make Patrick’s big-brained head shrink. Unfortunately it ended up backfiring as it shrunk SpongeBob’s head instead.

Novelty Toy Tongue

A fake tongue that is used to trick anyone that tries to grab him by the tongue. By ripping it off his real tongue, he can use the fake as a temporary rope to tie up foes and spin them around.

Grandma’s Sweater


Who knew that such a homemade gift could be so dangerous? The sweater’s got a mind of its own and it will take control of the wearer's body and mind, forcing them into a state that seems to be identical to that of a grandma’s behavior. The wearer’s consciousness will technically persist but the only way to stop its control over them is to get the sweater off.

Mermaid Man’s Ring

By wearing the “borrowed” ring and colliding it with Patrick’s own ring, SpongeBob and Patrick could teleport away as they temporarily don the Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy personas. With Mermaid Man’s powers, SpongeBob seems to gain a boost in stats and he could’ve gained Mermaid Man’s own water-bending abilities. The most interesting of these powers however would have to be the super saliva that SpongeBob can create at will, allowing him to glue things together by licking them. Push come to shove, he can also just restore broken objects by splashing them with that same saliva.

Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy’s Time Machine

On the outside, it just looks like a big metal box. On the inside however, it’s got a complex machine that allows the user and anyone inside of the box to time travel to any given year and any given destination. It was initially left alone as it proved to be too dangerous for use but Patrick would accidentally send everyone back in time. The machine would later be used by SpongeBob and Patrick to try and prevent the moment where they accidentally kickstarted a bad future… in fact they did this so many times to the point where multiple versions of them and their time machine started appearing at the same scene. Wonderful.

While it isn’t the exact same contraption, SpongeBob and Patrick also just… get their own time machine at some point.

Mermaid Man’s Utility Belt

When Mermaid Man would accidentally leave his belt at the Krusty Krab, SpongeBob would take the chance to steal it and have some fun with its numerous functions. The main emblem at the front isn’t just for show as squeezing it allows SpongeBob to shrink any target with its built in small-ray. Reversing that shrinking process proves to be difficult for SpongeBob but the belt’s also got a built-in mutating ray, a heat ray, a ray that comically increases one part of your body, a ray that peels off your skin, a ray that cuts you in half with scissors, and plenty of other torturous utilities.

Slide Whistle

This wind instrument is usually used to just make comedic sounds akin to sliding and whooping. In SpongeBob’s hands, he not only loves to make noise with it but the sounds it generates allows him to automatically open doors and smoothly move across surfaces as if they were covered in butter. Strangely enough, it can just blatantly grant SpongeBob the ability to fly through the air.

Lucky Brick

It’s very lucky!

Other Weapons

  • Condiment Gun: A giant ketchup-bottle-shaped gun that shoots out globs of ketchup and mustard. It’s reserved for true times of war.
  • Bubble Blower: Created specifically for SpongeBob through Mawgu technology, this gun uses a radiated bubble solution to trap enemies in bubbles.
  • Math Bubble Gun: A bubble gun that is used to trap jellyfish in bubbles for educational purposes.
  • Spikey Cleats: Why does he have these again?
  • Spiked Metal Gauntlet: No seriously, where does he keep getting these?
  • Pineapple Bombs: Yum.
  • Pattypult: A slingshot that specializes in shooting Krabby Patties.
  • Mermarang: A super boomerang that belonged to Mermaid Man of the past.
  • Snowball Blower: It’s like the Reef Blower but it shoots out snowballs.
  • Sporks: Not much to say really.
  • Anchor Pump: A weapon that allows SpongeBob to pump air into enemies and inflate them until they pop.
  • Broom: SpongeBob loves to throw it around like a boomerang.
  • Jellyfish Blasters: Makeshift guns that are meant to deal with jellyfish.
  • Peashooter: It do be shooting peas.
  • Vacuum: Separate from his Reef Blower, this dust vacuum can deal with Dirty Bubbles to ensure that the world stays clean.
  • Backpack with weaponry: Plankton would give SpongeBob a backpack that is filled with lasers, a flamethrower, and even a missile. Unfortunately he would press its singular button and accidentally destroy it in one use.
  • Exploding Pie Launcher: It sends out exploding pies.
  • Tartar Sauce Travel Pack: Shoots a consistent stream of tartar sauce that is especially effective against bosses.
  • Condiment Cannon: Not to be confused with the condiment gun, this one shoots out globs of ketchup, mustard, AND relish.
  • Pickle Blaster: Shoots out dangerous pickle slices.
  • Another Pickle Blaster: Instead of shooting out slices, it shoots out the whole ass pickles.
  • Neptuning Fork: Some kind of weird trident-shaped gun that shoots out electric bolts.
  • Bubblegum Blaster: It sends out exploding gumballs.
  • Plumsters: Weird plum-shaped bombs that can have multiple be placed down at once.
  • Freezing devices/freezing ray: Freezes enemies in place.

Other Items

Goofy Goober Guitar

Some kind of magical guitar that SpongeBob summons during the final fight of the first (and best) SpongeBob movie. He not only performed the hit song Goofy Goober Rock but said guitar also shot out lasers that easily destroyed every one of Plankton’s mind-controlling bucket helmets. In fact, said lasers were strong enough to rival lasers from King Neptune’s very own trident. Now that rocks.

Magic Book Page

Originally found on the Bikini Atoll island by the pirate Burger Beard, this magic book contains multiple pages that make anything written within it come to fruition through the power of reality warping. Burger Beard would use the entire book to steal the Krabby Patty secret formula from the Krusty Krab but SpongeBob and friends would manage to get their hands on one of the last few pages. With it, SpongeBob could give himself and his friends superhero powers while also teleporting them off of Pelican island, and once they managed to defeat Burger Beard, SpongeBob would warp everyone back to the Krusty Krab. Based on what Burger Beard could do with the book, SpongeBob could also banish his targets to distant lands, gain awareness of the whereabouts of others even when they’re time travelling, and redefine the fate of characters which had the potential to end the movie early.

SpongeBob does however need ink in order to write on the pages as well as time to write out what he wishes, meaning that his writing can be intercepted if acted upon fast enough.

Spinach Cans

A food so good that it can boost Popeye to unimaginable levels of power, all while being stored in a handy little can. Spinach in our world is usually a leafy vegetable that can provide high amounts of vitamins while being low calorie per serving, a relatively healthy food by today’s standards. In Popeye’s world, spinach… is actually still considered to be “regular spinach”. No really, it’s because of how humans in Popeye’s world are built that they get such a power boost from spinach (more on that later) but even with that in mind, the way that spinach boosts Popeye specifically is strange. Spinach does genuinely boost the stats of whoever consumes it but they never get boosted to the same degree that Popeye does, plus Popeye has been able to use plenty of abilities that non-Popeye characters never get to use themselves. It’s likely that Popeye’s consistent consumption of spinach over a long period of time has significantly increased the after effects that he gains, especially since some of that strength and a number abilities has even carried over to his normal self (I mean, look at Sweet Pea, he doesn’t even have spinach at this point in time!). Even when people try to eat 100+ spinach cans at once, Popeye’s own prolonged exposure to spinach will still grant him equal strength from just a singular can. This is all assuming that said non-Popeye character doesn’t have their body go out of control upon consuming spinach but either way, Popeye will always get the best benefits out of eating his spinach.

Regardless of spinach mechanics, it’s well known that spinach gives Popeye a plethora of powers but those will be listed under Popeye’s abilities. Instead, let’s focus on the innate powers that spinach has before we get to the wackier abilities. Spinach is guaranteed to give its user a boost in their physical stats to an absurd degree, letting them accomplish crazy feats of strength, speed, and skill that no regular human could ever accomplish. Should said person be damaged, a spinach can heal them back to tip-top shape alongside the restoration of their stamina reserves. It seems to also grant users enhanced talent in areas that the user had previously lacked prior to consumption, whether that would be harmless skills like piano playing and dancing or useful skills such as engineering and sword fighting. However, did you know that spinach can even boost non-sentient beings such as plants? They can not only improve a plant’s growth rate but they can revive withered plants near-instantly. The same can be said for the spinach power that can be imbued into inanimate objects, reverting dull and broken swords back to their peak, boosting the power of mechanical food mixers, or generally bringing about new life to his vehicles.  

When anyone that isn’t Popeye tries to eat the spinach, it can result in the undoing of abilities such as shapeshifting, clones, and transformations, and even the cans are noteworthy as they manage to absorb entire nuclear explosions within them. A simple rubbing of one of his cans even allows Popeye to summon a genie that had previously called a lamp its home (see Support). For something a little more supernatural, Popeye can get ahold of Ye King’s Spinach which allows Popeye to turn invisible and throw hands with ghosts.

Relish of the Gods

This special kind of food is composed of what can only be described as “fourth-dimensional ingredients”, and once someone consumes its contents, they end up tapping into the same powers that Eugene has showcased (which in of itself are tied to Eugene’s act of entering and leaving the fourth dimension). People who have eaten the relish have found themselves teleported from one place to another on complete accident. When they have a better control of its power, it can allow them to turn intangible and walk through walls. It even allows for people to transform back into their real selves if they’re not currently themselves and it can force people to act rational.

Other Foods

Popeye isn’t purely a spinach fanatic believe it or not. In fact, he’s gotten a power boost out of other foods as well.

Drinking Dutch milk gives Popeye’s punches the power that lets him explode Bluto into fireworks, eating Quaker Oats gives Popeye the strength and speed needed to send some aliens flying to the moon, eating pate de foie gras gives him the same iron (and thus strength) found in spinach, Campbell’s chunky soup with prime rib and vegetables can act as a substitute spinach, and this Knorr soup provides the same purpose.

Corn Cob Pipe

You can’t have a Popeye portrayal without his signature corn cob pipe that he always keeps inside of his mouth. It’s rustic by design and acts as the perfect tool for all of Popeye’s smoking and whistling needs. Given Popeye’s illogical world however, he’s gotten plenty of odd uses out of his pipe as well. Popeye can blow hard enough into the pipe to generate controlled flames that burn anything it's aimed at, allowing Popeye to cut through materials or simply set his targets ablaze. He can use said pipe to pull spinach into his mouth when his hands aren’t available or he can simply eat spinach and shoot it back out as if it were a spinach ray, allowing its effects to land on foes from afar. Creating a steady stream of light, unleashing smoke that is strong enough to knock others out, allowing Popeye to take to the skies, stretching his pipe and having it act like a hammer, and charming objects to the point of being under his control are just a few of the many times that Popeye’s pipe has been there to help him.

Guns

In truth, Popeye’s never been afraid to wield normal firearms like pistols and shotguns, especially when he has to kill something as miniscule as a fly. The latter of the two could easily fire pellets strong enough to take entire chunks out of his house.

Bow and Arrow

Robin Hood’s got nothing on this!

Lassos

Bluto would try to delay Popeye by cutting the rope bridge between two cliffs but Popeye would simply use his trusty lasso to pull the two cliffs together.

Anchors

In the game Popeye: Ijiwaru Majo Seahag no Maki, Popeye’s main choice of weapon would be an anchor on a chain that he would whip towards his foes. It also gives him the ability to fly, hurt ghosts, and send lightning bolts towards faraway foes.

Spacesuit

When Popeye needed to retrieve Sweet Pea from a mysterious figure, the Sea Hag would grant him, Olive, and Bluto futuristic space suits in order for them to trek into outer space.

Magic Pencil

Popeye always carries his trusty magic pencil on him in the case that he wants to teach the children at home the ways of drawing comics. The pencil itself has magic wings and can draw on its own but Popeye has to be the one to give it instructions on what to draw. We only see the pencil’s ability to bring people into existence but it’s likely that the pencil has all sorts of other functions.

Ink Pen

Popeye somehow got his hands on a giant pen and the implication is that he can draw himself into existence by using said pen. Granted, he isn’t the best at drawing but he tries his best.

Crystal Ball

In order to get back at Bluto for hanging out with Olive, he borrows a fortune teller’s crystal ball and uses it to show Olive and Bluto what would seemingly happen in the future. By showing them the future, it would get Olive mad enough at Bruno to the point of leaving right then and there.

Magic Ring

Having obtained it from a mermaid, Wimpy would gain access to a special magical ring that allows its wearer to see the thoughts of others. Popeye would then borrow it for himself and intercept others' line of thinking before they went through with it.

Ghost Grease

When Popeye needed to get rid of some annoying ghosts but would be unable to due to their intangible nature, Wimpy would show him the wonders of ghost grease. By simply slathering it on Popeye’s fists, Popeye’s fists could now not only interact with the ghostly world but his punches could completely erase them from existence.

Headache Pill

An experiment of O.G. Wotasnozzle’s that was meant to get rid of Popeye’s headache through the consumption of his pill. Unexpectedly enough, it wouldn’t be Popeye’s pain that would fade away as his visibility would end up fading away instead.

Giant Magnet

It’s pretty useful for dealing with sword-wielding foes. Popeye can also just create a magnet out of a girder when he’s boosted by his spinach.

Popeye Robot

Having stolen this off of Brutus, this robot acts and sounds identical to the real deal. It can be operated from a distance to do basic tasks or it can chase Brutus at Popeye’s command.

Zipper Paper

Popeye happened to carry a piece of paper with an interactable zipper on it, and when it’s laid flat onto a surface, Popeye can open a hole through any material by unzipping it open. He used this to escape the cage that Bluto had kept him in.

Time Machine

Olive would accidentally order a “do-it-yourself time machine” when she just wanted some wood for her fireplace but Popeye would choose to build that time machine to prove it wasn’t just junk. You see, the time machine was only made out of sticks and wheels, and yet, it allowed Popeye and Olive to travel back to the prehistoric era and back without issue. Weird.

Popeye Kart Racing Pickups

I didn’t even know that this game was a thing. In its attempt to copy Mario Kart’s own item system, Popeye’s kart racer has a limited number of “pickups” that Popeye can grab while he is racing on his kart.

Projectile: Popeye will throw his spinach can and it will track any opponent in front of him, causing them to spin around and slow down upon being hit.

Boost: It gives you extra speed. Thank you game guide, that is very elaborate.

Dollop: An oil patch will fall behind Popeye, causing anyone that drives over it to uncontrollably slip around and potentially fall off the track.

Invulnerability: It may be very on-the-nose in name but it is essentially Mario Kart’s own version of the star. Popeye begins to glow as he travels at faster speeds, being invulnerable to all damage until the timer runs out.

Nuke: By collecting enough of the pickups marked as N, Popeye is seemingly able to hit every opponent on the track with a single attack. Whether it’s actually meant to be a nuke is unclear since we never see it in game.

Popeye: Rush For Spinach Items

In this party game, Popeye can come across numerous item boxes that are found across the map. Once he comes into contact with those items, a negative effect will be applied onto his opponents no matter how far away they are from him.

Item Swap: On contact, this item will immediately swap the position and items of Popeye and a randomly chosen opponent.

Thunder Cloud: A cloud spawns above the opponent and shocks them with a lightning bolt.

Rooster Head: This transmutates opponents into birds when activated.

D-Pad: An item that temporarily reverses the direction and actions of an opponent.

Effect Shield: An invisible shield that protects its user from status effects for a short time.

Vehicles

Boat

He may not have the license but that hasn’t stopped SpongeBob from driving it in the past!

Unicycle

If SpongeBob can’t get his hands on a boat, then a unicycle would have to be his next best option. It lets him pedal great distances without the need for any sort of license.

Patty Wagon

In order to get to Shell City without needing to worry about the whole license thing, SpongeBob would use a special car designed after the ever beloved Krabby Patties. It’s got the sesame seed finish, the steel-belted pickles, the grilled leather interior, and underneath the hood lies a fuel injected french fryer with dual overhead grease traps. Said wagon would also be upgraded to have a greater length, double the pickle wheels, ketchup and mustard bottles for greater acceleration, and a stovetop on the back to really boost its speed.

Mystery the Seahorse

SpongeBob would meet a wild seahorse and keep her as a pet, appropriately naming her Mystery. As his newfound pet and friend, Mystery can take SpongeBob across great distances… or she can instead choose to eat everything in her path. She will literally eat everything from flowers to stoves to entire fish (rip Old Man Jenkins) but what’s not to like about this seahorse?

Plane

Oh the places he’ll go.

Ghostboard

In Titans of the Tide, a special surfboard known as a Ghostboard would be needed in order to surf over large bodies of goo and even land. It does have its limits as it can’t go past inconveniently-placed “No-Ghostboard” zones but it looks cool at least.

Ships

In order to travel the seas, Popeye’s always gotta rely on a trusty vessel to take him the distance. He’s used plenty of ships over the course of his series’, many of which go by many different names (the Spinacher, the Lady Olive, the Elsie, Popeye’s Ark, etc). He’s used tugboats, sailboats, rowboats, and all the like, most of which not being entirely notable by themselves. The most notable of these ships was the very first ship that Popeye had served on, that being the Josie Lee.

Cars

Popeye’s also had his fair share of cars in many shorts.

Propeller Planes

Even when they’re not his planes technically, Popeye’s become very familiar with piloting planes in the few instances that he’s had to use them. At the bare minimum, he should have access to a mini propeller plane that had been boosted by spinach in a previous race, enabling it to fly at speeds greater than modern planes while unleashing flames hot enough to melt those planes into nothing.

Yellow Submarine

Despite not being completely familiar with its controls, Popeye’s attempted to pilot a yellow submarine by simply pushing buttons and praying for the best. The submarine obviously isn’t any normal submarine as it has functions that allow it to teleport to different areas such as the sea of trash and even to entire spatial dimensions.

Support

Hans

This strange disembodied live-action arm is known as Hans within SpongeBob’s world. You may recognize him from the theme song as he’s the one to give SpongeBob his ever-iconic square pants but he tends to be by SpongeBob’s side to lend him a hand. He often appears from off-screen and uses his singular hand to give SpongeBob items, interact with the world around him, and grab SpongeBob to carry him around. He’s carried SpongeBob outside of his cartoon in order to get rid of his suds and he can just as easily save SpongeBob when he falls into out-of-bounds areas in Battle For Bikini Bottom, even when SpongeBob is currently in areas that are located within dreams.

Hans has also been capable of taking off like a rocket, performing hypnotism, and he could even wrestle with and intercept a rogue Chum Bucket glove. SpongeBob should certainly be capable of summoning Hans by his side whenever he wants as he can not only get him to appear by taking off his pants and singing his theme song but Hans will automatically appear to save SpongeBob when needed.

Pencils the Pirate

In the SpongeBob comics, a guy named Pencils the Pirate is responsible for writing out each and every comic in-universe. He is the author that writes out the very events that occur in the ocean below, and while we don’t see him often, it’s canonically implied that he’s the one responsible for writing out every SpongeBob comic. Not only can he oversee every event and talk to the reader directly but he can write and draw new pages in real time in order to change SpongeBob’s fate, even being able to bring him to the real world to defeat an enemy that was actively threatening Pencils. If Pencils is unable to write in the current moment, he could still affect SpongeBob’s world through unorthodox means and cause new pages to spawn without his writing input.

Granted, Pencils is still a regular guy that can easily be threatened by actual danger above the sea, plus he’s gotten severe writer's block before so there may be a case where he finds himself unable to write any more SpongeBob comics. It’s not like he even exists above the entire SpongeBob universe either as he does literally exist in their world, only being above the sea.

…Himself?

SpongeBob is never alone due to his duplication capabilities. Each clone seems to be capable of independent thought so since SpongeBob can always just clone himself whenever he wants, he can always have a sponge buddy by his side. He can also use time travel to bring in variants of himself from different points in time if he needs any additional help.

The Audience

It’s implied across two incarnations of Popeye that an audience not only exists outside of Popeye’s cartoon but said audience can actually interact with Popeye and his cartoon world. For example, Popeye would be getting his ass beat by Bluto but in an attempt to give Popeye the spinach he desperately needs, a kid in the audience would be able to grab a spinach can and throw it into the cartoon. Luckily that can would land right in front of Popeye and give him the power boost he needed to whoop Brutus’ ass. Popeye also isn’t afraid to directly ask the audience for a spinach can when he somehow forgot his can at home.

Whiffle Hen

The Whiffle Hen is, by far, the most useful creature that Popeye has access to. All Popeye has to do is whistle and the Whiffle Hen will teleport right onto his finger, ready to assist Popeye in any way possible. What is a Whiffle Hen you may ask? Well, it is a rare magical bird that hails from the 4th dimension, and after it stayed by the side of Castor Oyl, Popeye would soon meet the bird and learn of its powers.

Simply rubbing its feathers provides its nearby user with two effects. By rubbing those feathers, virtually any wish can be granted, including wishes that can manipulate the minds of others like how it did when Popeye wished that Wimpy despised hamburgers. Those wishes have also been able to cancel out other spells, completely undoing their effects on the user instantly. However, there exists a second innate property of the Whiffle Hen’s feathers. Whiffle Hens are regarded as the luckiest being across not only the galaxy but across every plane of reality, and when contact is made with its three feathers, the user has their luck boosted to the point of practically being unstoppable. Impossible tasks such as taking 16 bullets with little harm, forcing an attack to miss even when you’re standing still, or keeping your body alive after you die are just a few of the applications of a Whiffle Hen’s luck.

It’s not like Popeye needs the entire hen either as simply having a feather in his pocket can provide him with enough luck to do the impossible.

Genie

As alluded to before, Popeye’s got a genie within his spinach can. He (or his lookalike) may have met and been assisted by said genie within a fictionalized movie but it ultimately doesn’t matter as we see that in the quote on quote “real world”, the same exact genie acts as Popeye’s chauffeur despite the fact that he was only portrayed as a movie character prior. It should be fine to give Popeye the genie if you really want to, although his lack of appearance elsewhere does make it hard to justify.

In any case, this genie should be able to use every ability he showcased in his movie. He can shapeshift into anything he wants, create any object out of thin air, give people the ability to turn invisible and intangible on command, telekinetically carry large structures over great distances, and turn others into animals. Generally speaking, the genie follows standard genie rules like being able to grant three wishes and following whoever his current master is (Popeye in this case), but just like a certain other blue genie, he no longer needs his lamp. Instead, Popeye just has to rub one of his spinach cans to summon him at will.

…Himself?

Popeye not only exists in his cartoon world but it’s implied that he also exists outside of it at the same time. It’s weird but there are numerous instances in which he is actually drawing his own cartoon world from the artist’s studio and also watches them as if they were cartoons… despite still being the same Popeye that exists in said cartoon. He could potentially redraw himself if you believe that this artist version of Popeye exists above his entire cartoon but you could also argue that this higher Popeye can give his other self spinach if needed.

Basic Abilities

Sponge Physiology

As a supposed sea sponge that actually takes the form of a kitchen sponge, SpongeBob’s body is nothing more than extraordinary. He is known for being absorbent and yellow and porous (is he) and that reflects in his basic sponge-like abilities.

For starters, SpongeBob is naturally 4 inches tall and is usually a character that needs to be submerged in water to survive. While that weakness would occasionally be contradicted in certain episodes, SpongeBob is generally portrayed as a character that would do best when submerged in water. His body can naturally bend, twist, and stretch to great lengths and it ends up being malleable enough to the point of letting him shapeshift into all kinds of things (more on that later). Its malleability also causes basic attacks to find their impacts absorbed with little signs of actual damage towards SpongeBob’s body. Of course, his kitchen-sponge-like body also just lets him absorb all kinds of things into his body as he’s been shown to absorb all kinds of things such as immense amounts of water, paint, root beer, grease, garbage, Krabby Patty meat, ghosts, etc. Those absorbed substances find themselves trapped within Bob and make him much bigger in the process but he can also just as easily send those substances flying back towards his enemies. Speaking of those pores, they can be used as makeshift cannons to launch anything within SpongeBob’s body, essentially shooting miniguns worth of projectiles or catching incoming projectiles and using his pores to redirect them.

For some other quirks, SpongeBob’s got Nice DNA that can turn others as nice as him if it’s ever passed onto someone else’s body. He can also empty his body (somehow) to occasionally store items and his pores allow him to access those items later. His tongue can be used to slide down sandy slopes/metallic surfaces, he can literally clear his mind to grant himself a bit of dumb luck, and his tongue can even become sentient and detach from SpongeBob… for some reason. Given that every other part of his body such as his brain and his heart also appear to have sentience, it may just be an odd consistency.

Enhanced Senses

Detached from his spongey body entirely, SpongeBob also happens to have exceptional senses. He could clearly see and hear Squidward despite having his body parts located far away from the Krusty Krab, he was able to see nanometers worth of distance with just a magnifying glass, and he and Patrick could see the Badlands which was located 20,000 leagues away from their current location. His sense of smell is exceptional in how he could catch the smell of a Krabby Patty from what was essentially miles worth of distance, and by detaching his nose, it can sniff out familiar scents on its own accord. SpongeBob can also just drive while blindfolded, driving way better than he ever could with his eyes wide open.

These senses are so potent that SpongeBob can easily cook invisible food, they can detect an argument on SpongeBob from a completely different time period altogether, and he could clean places down to their subatomic and theoretical particles; that’s also not mentioning the special senses that go beyond his usual five. His squiddy sense always tells him where Squidward is and he’ll always be able to detect when someone doesn’t know what fun is even when he’s not there to hear it. He may even literally know everything if we want to buy what Squidward said, as he would state that SpongeBob remembers everything that ever happened, everything that never happened, and everything that will happen. Granted, he is in a very panicked state and could just be saying a whole lot of fish paste but SpongeBob has been shown to have an exceptional memory before so it’s not… implausible.

Imagination

The imagination is a very powerful thing in SpongeBob’s world. Most characters choose to ground themselves in their oceanic reality but SpongeBob's childish nature grants him a level of imaginative power unlike any other sea creature. His imagination is so powerful that his thoughts actively warp the fabric of reality and make anything possible as long as he believes in it. For example, take the instance where SpongeBob tricked Plankton into thinking there was a monster in the Krusty Krab. It may just seem like a dumb Plankton moment but it did manage to conjure a proper impression within his sight (as stated by Plankton himself) and Plankton’s own imagination could accomplish a similar feat through purposefully conjuring an embarrassing moment that Krabs found himself in. According to SpongeBob, the imagination can let you transform anything into your desires, whether it’d be a cardboard box into a spaceship, a bucket of sand into a sand castle, the sky into a portal, and the surroundings into whatever environment suits your emotional state or thought out scenario.

His imagination is what directly powers his imagination box and it’s implied to be the very reason why SpongeBob has showcased so many random abilities across the series. He can wave his hand over someone’s sight to forcefully alter their perception of reality, turn his laugh into solid text that can physically interact with the world, and pull objects he imagines out of his thoughts.

Immortality and Regeneration

No matter how many times you try to put this damn sponge down, he will always find some way to get back up.

Even if he loses his limbs, been flattened, has his skin ripped off, is sliced or ripped in half, is ripped into shreds, blows up into small pieces, had his skeleton scared out of him, has been split into rain drops, had his skeleton scared out of his body, been reduced to only his eyes, been reduced to dust, been reduced to ash or completely blown up into nothing, SpongeBob will continue to live on as if nothing had happened. Immediately after taking any of this damage, his body will instantly begin to regenerate and bring him back to his regular goober self. His brain can stay detached for long periods of time but if his brain stems ever give out, it can dumb him down significantly.

He can even continue living on as a ghost, and as a ghost, he is actually able to regenerate his soul as well. Assuming that SpongeBob has the same ghostly properties as the Flying Dutchman, SpongeBob should be able to come back from having his soul split apart, splattered like paste, or popped like a balloon.

Double Death

Death doesn’t stop for anyone except for SpongeBob characters apparently. Even when SpongeBob characters “die” in their ghost form, those deaths cause them to inexplicably come back to life as if nothing had happened to them.

Slime

In Nickelodeon All Star Brawl 2, a core mechanic of that game would be centered around the “slime” that every fighter has access to. By damaging opponents, an imaginary slime meter is filled up, and once that meter is full, SpongeBob can choose to use it for one of many purposes. That slime can be used to enhance the power and range of SpongeBob’s attacks, increase SpongeBob’s own air mobility by giving him an air dash, temporarily freeze an opponent in place with a slime cancel, or allow SpongeBob to escape attacks by countering with a slime burst. It may also have the capability to nullify powers like Clockwork’s time powers, but only if SpongeBob manages to get a boost in slime from outside forces.

Resistances: The Consistent

Resistances: The Inconsistent

Vulnerabilities

Cartoon Physiology

To be completely honest, Popeye’s body alone is a miracle in of itself. He is one of many characters that were made during the rubberhouse era of cartoons, technically being classified as a character made under the umbrella of Fleischer/Famous Studios. Given that all of their cartoons were made under the same studio and that there are consistencies amongst their physiologies, Popeye likely is made of the very ink that comes out of the inkwells of his animators. Everything that he accomplishes within his older cartoons can seemingly be attributed to his actual cartoon physiology, especially since Popeye’s world loves to mess with the cartoon properties of their world. As a rubberhose character, Popeye's body can act like rubber and allow him to stretch and squash in ways that no normal person could. He can literally bounce cannonballs and bullets off of his body, compress himself to squeeze into smaller spaces, have parts of his body stretched in order to tank attacks, and pop back up from damage fairly easily.

Besides his rubbery body, it turns out that Popeye is strange in many other areas. He can easily breathe in environments such as outer space or under the sea, he canonically has a pure soul, and his consciousness can persist when his body is destroyed, allowing him to persist in reality and continue talking as if nothing happened. While it’s not established to be the same exact ability, Popeye’s nothingness could still grab objects in the world and take advantage of spinach cans to return Popeye to his usual self. Most importantly however, his innate rubbery body and pure determination often lets him just ignore any sort of blunt pain or the pain that is felt when holes are made through his body.

Popeye’s Source Being

…If only Popeye’s physiology were so simple.

In the recent comic known as Eye Lie Popeye, an entirely new system would be added onto Popeye’s world. The physical existence of every living being is simply an illusion as they are simply an “avatar” that is controlled by a greater force known as “The Source”. This “Source” is responsible for the creation of everything and it’s portrayed as a radiant energy field that exists at the center of the universe. No Popeye character ever has a true self in their world as their physical forms are just constructs and the energy within their puppeted bodies is meant to entertain those character’s true consciousnesses until they wither away. Even then however, the consciousness continues to stay intact and exist beyond their physical world. Source beings can only usually stay attuned to and control one body at a time but due to life existing on a spectrum, other bodies can be accessed through the physical disconnection of the physical body (such as sleeping or death). This allows the consciousness to manifest other avatars in unknown planes of existence, albeit most people will only experience these as dreams in their world. What this all means is that Popeye’s consciousness and life force are stored in the center of the universe, meaning that any damage done to his physical body won’t mean much when his essence will allow him to persist after death, allowing him to regenerate regardless of the erasure of his body. The only way in which Popeye could be killed is if the Source is located and eliminated, thus taking out Popeye’s consciousness with it. It would also mean that plenty of hax that only work on Popeye’s physical body would be unable to kill him properly and it proves difficult to even soul-steal him when that soul is technically located far away from his body.

Regarding Popeye himself, the powers that he (and others) gain from spinach is likely tied back to the fact that they all are source beings. It’s the closest thing to a canon explanation for why spinach ends up boosting Popeye characters to an absurd degree and it’s unlikely that spinach will give the same boost in power to anyone who lacks anything similar to source energy within their body. Popeye is considered to be special compared to other source beings as spinach lets him connect to countless other source beings, creating a siphon of source energy within him that allows him to have unlimited control over others' own sense of reality. It’s basically the explanation for how Popeye is able to get away with all his nonsense while grounding it within a sort of realistic setting. The number of beings that he can connect to goes up to tens of thousands but his enraged state lets him further multiply those sources at will. For unknown reasons, Popeye can also just instantly ramp up the individual intensities of his source energies, continuously making him stronger and stronger.

I should’ve expected buffs from the Shonen-like comic but jeez.

Enhanced Senses

For as abnormal of a man that Popeye is, enhanced senses are certainly the least surprising thing here. Despite the fact that sound is unable to travel through space, Popeye could hear Olive’s horn-boosted screams for help while he was on the moon. Super hearing may just be a consistent ability of his but his senses are enhanced beyond his ears. He’s been able to fight and navigate while blindfolded, see and hear someone else’s nonexistent mirages, and he has a sort of sixth sense that tells him where danger is even when it doesn’t make sense. He knows when he’s being watched, he can sense any evil within his general vicinity, he could hear Olive’s and Bluto’s telepathic conversation despite his lack of presence in the conversation, he knows when Olive kisses/was kissed by someone that wasn’t him, and his fists can sense and head straight for danger even when Popeye doesn’t feel it.

Unconscious Action

Even when his body is knocked out or out of commission, Popeye will continue to fight away, drag people to unknown places, or stop ongoing crimes. As long as his mind is set to a goal, his body will automatically act on its own, sometimes betraying his mind altogether. Of course, Popeye’s body can also pull out spinach and digest it as if Popeye had been awake the whole time. Spinach by nature also makes you compelled to fight even if your mind has no control over your spinach-influenced body, mostly shown when Bluto/Brutus ever have spinach shoved down their throat. It’s a good thing that Popeye never has to deal with such effects since eating spinach just wakes him up regardless.

Supernatural Luck

Don’t you ever wonder how Popeye always manages to get his spinach? I mean, a lot of the time his opponent just stands there, but even when he gets his cans taken away or is launched far away from any potential places with spinach, he will always eat his spinach and defeat the bad guy of the day. There are also plenty of events that have no tie to spinach whatsoever that always work out for Popeye, no matter if they were on accident or purpose. Objects literally fall into place in such a way that it works to Popeye’s favor, whether that’d be pens into ink canisters, perfectly punching cat litter onto the walls for a new coat of paint, having his car come back together perfectly after it was run over by a train, so on and so forth. He can’t even be hurt on some occasions despite him purposefully wanting to get in harm’s way. No sailor should have this amount of luck, and yet, the odds will never fully stack against him.

There is in fact a logical explanation to why Popeye is so lucky to begin with. If you remember that Whiffle Hen from earlier, they are regarded as the luckiest beings across every plane of reality. Due to the fact that Popeye spent a lot of time around Sweet Pea who is cosmically attuned with the Whiffle Hen, some of that luck would rub off onto Popeye to the point where Popeye is passively lucky. It’s the very reason why the Sea Hag has never been able to defeat him and given previous examples, Popeye’s luck is easily on the level of the Whiffle Hen. There may even be enough luck to outright surpass the Whiffle Hen’s luck altogether as that innate luck could slightly override Ham Gravy’s newfound Whiffle Hen luck. This is the same luck that practically made Ham Gravy impossible to hit, and yet Popeye managed to land a scratch on him at some point. Given this, Popeye can likely just negate any luck that his enemies may have.

Immortality and Regeneration

A good sailor man never goes down with a fight but in Popeye’s case, it might as well be impossible. When being strong to the finich by eating his spinach isn’t enough to overcome the odds, he can easily bounce back from pretty much anything that his enemies can throw at him. Even without spinach, Popeye should be as unkillable as other characters in his world since he is the strongest guy around; having holes blown through their chests, turning into puddles of liquid, and continuing to live on without a soul (demons can do the same but it’d be debatable to assume that Popeye has the same physiology as them) are just a few instances of Popeye characters’ survivability, all of which Popeye could likely replicate due to having a shared physiology among every person in his world. It helps that Popeye has casually been able to reattach his face after it was wiped off, walked off the pain of and could recover from broken necks multiple times (including ones from the all-powerful Toar), came back from being flattened, continued living even when he was cut up into pieces, and been able to live and eat spinach as a skeleton.

Even when his entire body was disintegrated or phased into nothing, Popeye’s consciousness allowed him to pick up his dropped spinach can and consume said spinach despite there being nothing to digest the spinach. Spinach power would obviously regenerate Popeye’s entire body in the process but in the comics, it can explicitly bring him back to life even when he does die. The only real limit to this regeneration is that Popeye won’t be able to eat his spinach if his atoms are completely scattered, which while it would be inconsistent with how his cartoon portrays disintegration, Popeye could regenerate regardless as coming into contact with spinach spray lets him come back all the same. Of course, any amount of spinach will automatically heal any of Popeye’s bruises and injuries.

Resistances

Without his spinach:

With his spinach:

Vulnerabilities

Techniques

KAH-RAH-TAY

This special kind of karate would be a version that SpongeBob’s not only taken a great liking to but it’s also one that he practices, especially when he chooses to brawl with his pal Sandy. While it is mainly similar to karate in our real world and is actually inspired by the likes of Inspector Clouseau and Cato from the Pink Panther movies, SpongeBob uses it in unorthodox ways to take down his foes. He may not be the absolute best at it but he can still take foes down with a mix of karate chops and kicks while being able to use his spongey body to absorb the damage dealt to him.

His upgraded karate spins can reflect incoming projectiles and he should also be able to use basic techniques such as closing his eyes and focusing to see an opponent's silhouette and their next move, allowing him to automatically intercept it.

Roundhouse Kick

A standard roundhouse kick. Not much to it really.

Inverse Whirlpool

By laying on his head and twisting his legs around each other, his feet start to move in a propeller motion. Once they spin hard enough to let him levitate SpongeBob can send himself flying forward as he knocks down anything in his path.

Double Overhand Squirrel Knot

Grabbing his foe and twisting them around enough can let SpongeBob turn the foe into a temporary ball, to which he can then send rolling straight through structures.

Telephone Strike

In the case that SpongeBob is nowhere close to his opponent, he can call them on his phone to try and attack them via transporting his fist through the phone and straight towards the foe. Unfortunately for him, this can easily backfire if the opponent sends his hand back through the same phone.

Bouncing Strike


It may seem like SpongeBob is missing his attack but in truth, he sends his fist flying into surfaces in order for it to ricochet back towards an opponent for a surprise attack!

Battle For Bikini Bottom/The Cosmic Shake/Titans of the Tide Moveset

As befitting for his platformer games, SpongeBob must have a versatile moveset at all times.

Bubble Spin: By spinning around while holding out his bubble wand, SpongeBob can strike nearby enemies.

Bubble Bash: While wearing a bubble Viking helmet, SpongeBob jumps upward and hits enemies from below.

Bubble Bowl: This bubble bowling ball can be thrown by SpongeBob to hit a target at mid range. Holding down the button lets SpongeBob charge the attack and send it flying faster than before.

Bubble Bounce: A move that allows SpongeBob to slam on enemies from above with his bubble feet.

Cruise Bubble: A controllable bubble missile that will last for a few seconds and hit enemies at farther ranges.

SpongeBall: Transforming into a ball allows SpongeBob to roll around at high speeds.

Ground Pound: Just like his Bubble Bounce, SpongeBob can slam onto enemies from above.

Dodge: A maneuver that lets Bob avoid danger by cartwheeling out of the way.

Karate Kick: While in midair, SpongeBob can lock onto a target and kick at them, sending him flying forward.

Mobility moves: In a lot of these games, SpongeBob usually has the ability to double jump, glide, and bubble surf to reach new areas.

Nickelodeon All Star Brawl Moveset

Across both Nickelodeon All Star Brawl games, SpongeBob’s certainly had quite the moveset. We’ll only be covering the interesting moves as a lot of these really are just glorified basic attacks.

Spin Attack: SpongeBob quickly launches himself forward while spinning around.

Imaginaaation Clap: Clapping above himself not only creates the iconic rainbow but it either deals damage around or above SpongeBob… it depends on which game you’re playing really.

Imaginaaation Kick: A kick that not only acts like a strong spike but also summons that same rainbow.

Order Up: By utilizing the power of the hydrodynamic spatula, SpongeBob can get back on stage by launching himself upwards, hitting multiple times as he rises.

Chomp: SpongeBob’s down special in the first game. He simply chomps at anyone in his way.

Anchor Arm Slam: While wearing his anchor arms, SpongeBob slams them downward to hit nearby foes.

Loop-De-Loop: By lifting both of his legs upwards while airborne, he can hit foes on both sides and even spike them

Bring It Around Town: Originally a bubble blowing technique of his, SpongeBob’s feet stay firmly in place while he spins his whole body around to hit foes.

Reef Landing: Wielding his trusty reef blower, SpongeBob blows himself downwards and squashes anyone who happens to be below him.

Fishbowl Strike: By getting inside a fishbowl, SpongeBob can roll forward over a short distance to deal damage.

Chef Flip: SpongeBob’s trusty spatula is used to catch opponents and flip them like Krabby Patties, allowing him to follow up with a different attack.

Nickelodeon & The Dice of Destiny Moveset

In one of the newest Nickelodeon crossover games, SpongeBob would be a prominent playable character with his very own moveset.

Order Up! Combo: SpongeBob swings his trusty spatula in front of him two times.

Kah-Rah-Tay: While wielding his karate gloves, SpongeBob spins around multiple times with the power of imagination.

Shield Bash: By charging up his shield, he can bash that shield over a wide area in front of him.

Ol’ Reliable: SpongeBob pulls out his jellyfishing net and slams it hard into the ground, dealing a hefty amount of damage to enemies in front of him.

Bubble Blast: SpongeBob sends a bubble flying forward, causing damage to be dealt to everything in its path.

Pretty Patty: This pretty patty allows SpongeBob to recover a bit of health on the fly.

Goofy Goober: Donning his wizard-like appearance and his sick guitar, SpongeBob flies into the air and rains lightning upon his foes while spinning around like crazy.

The Twisker Sock

This move is one of Popeye’s most powerful and well-known techniques whenever he has to throw hands. By wounding up his arm behind him, Popeye’s fist begins to spin around like a drill while he sends his fist flying towards his opponent. This ends up amplifying the punch’s’ power to an unknown degree, often acting as one of Popeye’s finishing moves. If he presses an opponent up to a surface with his continually-spinning fist, he can end up drilling them into the surface they’re pushed up into.

Double Twisker Sock

A double fist version of the Twisker Sock that delivers with twice the power. It’s mainly been used to send people flying or to disassemble complex contraptions.

Twisker Throw

By spinning his body around to gain momentum while holding onto his target, he can send them flying with enough precision to skip them across large bodies of water.

Cosmic Punch

This punch would be powerful enough to send people into the stratosphere, which while it isn’t a pleasant experience on the receiving end, Popeye is at least generous enough to catch his falling foes.

Flurry of Punches

A more standard move of Popeye’s. He’ll continuously chip away at his foes with his fast flurry of punches, going as far to send his shockwaves towards foes who are just out of reach. Popeye would even use the sonic booms of his rapid-fire punches to disturb this lady’s water barrier when he was previously unable to land direct damage onto her.

Atomic Punch

By utilizing the iron atoms from his spinach, Popeye can start a chain reaction within his body that will send him flying forward like a rocket. This move proves to be especially useful for when Popeye needs to land solid hits on people that are ten times his size.

Fence Post Punch

If someone like Brutus tried to sneak attack him, Popeye can retaliate by hammering his foe into the ground with both fists.

Pinwheel Special

By spinning his arm around in a circular motion, Popeye can either deal continuous damage to the opponent in front of him or he can choose to build up enough momentum to send a singular target flying.

Double Lariat

Popeye sure does love to spin around for his fighting techniques huh. By spinning his whole body around on the spot while holding his fist out, even a swarm of enemies have no chance at getting close to him without being beaten to a pulp.

Spin Dash

Getting deja vu from this very specific move…

Radio Punch

By punching a radio of any sort, Popeye can send his punch flying through its wires/frequency to land a blow to anyone on its receiving end.

Wrestling

Although Popeye’s wrestling skill isn’t shown off too often, he has certainly used it on some occasions to intercept foes that try to grab him.

“Toon” Abilities

Shapeshifting

Due to having such a malleable body, SpongeBob can transform his spongy body into anything he wants to imitate. Whether it’d be giant hands, parachutes, hammers, snails, clarinets, drills, Plankton’s pet, clams, mail cannons, plenty of his friends, and so on, there’s nothing that SpongeBob can’t assume the form of. He’s shapeshifting into things as big as Patrick’s house and he could assume the shape of the moon when he had enough water to do so. In regards to how useful that shapeshifting is, SpongeBob can use it to create tools that get him out of tough situations, dodge incoming attacks, make himself bigger and stronger by turning buff, and trick others by shapeshifting into the items they want to use.

Duplication

One sponge too many if you ask me. SpongeBob’s prone to duplicating himself many times over through numerous methods. Some methods reflect the sea sponge’s own asexual reproduction as SpongeBob’s body can split up into smaller pieces that gain their own sentience. They can either bud out of his body or he can take enough damage to forcefully be split into multiple mini SpongeBobs. Luckily those mini SpongeBobs can come back together to recreate a singular normal-sized SpongeBob but that’s not the only way for SpongeBob to multiply.

He can simply duplicate at will, either slicing off thin bits of him to create clones or just creating clones from nothing. With the power of dreams, SpongeBob could easily make a million clones of himself, and it’s likely that he can go far beyond this if he’s up to the challenge. He can also grow new limbs that are identical to his old ones, allowing him to wield multiple arms and legs at once.

Flight

SpongeBob can inflate his own body or inflate his pants to float through the air, turn his legs into thrusters, or he can simply just… choose to fly.

Teleportation

There’s a non-zero chance that SpongeBob can and has already teleported to your location as he can just pop away from one place and pop into another. He’s also used his imagination to create portals. The scariest fact of all is that SpongeBob can just teleport objects onto you without your permission, such the case when SpongeBob teleported the rocket skates in his hand onto Squidward’s tentacles.

Elemental Control

Fire Control: He somehow managed to turn his fire resistant suit into fire before he then turned the fire into Pretty Patties.

Ice Control: By donning a cool persona, SpongeBob can simply walk into a room and freeze everyone within his sights.

Water Control: Utilizing his own tears as a material, SpongeBob would make a sweater for Squidward. Water in SpongeBob’s world is also weird given that all of Bikini Bottom is already underwater and yet SpongeBob can cry hard enough to flood Bikini Bottom.

Sand Control: With some sand and a little imagination, SpongeBob can practically create any battle-ready structure, weapon, and even lifeforms to engage in an all-out sand war.

String Transmutation

Random loose threads may seem harmless but SpongeBob’s act of pulling at them causes everything to fall apart. Even if the string is just a singular string on someone’s clothing or on a knot, it can lead to SpongeBob unravelling everything. Clothes, wooden picture frames, numbers on a dollar, vehicles, entire structures, entire civilizations, entire people, and even the entire universe can be turned into a normal string.

Size Shifting

With merely just a thought, SpongeBob can gradually shrink himself to sizes or enlarge himself by either absorbing enough water or doing it through natural means. He can accidentally shrink by being exposed to too much heat but he can also grow to large sizes if he absorbs enough suds.

Driving You Mad

SpongeBob drives characters mad, what else is new? His personality can really get to you at times but it’s always that dreaded laugh. Prolonged exposure to SpongeBob’s laugh not only drives you insane but it is potent enough to where it can make technology go haywire and blow up. Those laughs can also persist for what was essentially centuries worth of time if SpongeBob traps them within a sealed container, and even after he dies, SpongeBob’s laughter will continue to exist even two thousand years after his time. Attempting to enter his mind will take you to a mindscape filled with an overwhelming amount of cuteness and wholesomeness that is practically guaranteed to drive even those with no fear crazy. There’s also Mrs. Puff who was driven to such a degree of insanity that she would hallucinate SpongeBob’s presence and end up in a time loop of her greatest fear being played out over and over again with seemingly no end.

Mind-Based Abilities

This sponge has already seen all your thoughts of the day… whether you like it or not.

Reading minds has never been easier when SpongeBob can simply hear you speak to yourself, see your literal thought bubbles, or physically enter/teleport into your head to hear and see those inner thoughts clearly. When he wants you to forget something, he can simply blow away your current thoughts or physically erase every single memory of yours to make room for new memories. He has also intervened with Squidward’s inner narration by inserting his own, he has assaulted Gary’s mind with subliminal messages, he could randomly engage in a telepathic conversation with Squidward, and he’ll always know when someone’s entered his mind.

Dream Hopping

Dreams are often a place where one’s consciousness wanders upon resting their body, but even your dreams aren’t a safe space from the sponge. As an extension of his imagination powers, SpongeBob can go to sleep and imagine himself in his own dream world, to which that SpongeBob projection can then exit the real SpongeBob’s dream and enter the real world. From there, that SpongeBob can hop into others' dreams and interact with the world within those dreams. Those worlds can not only be altered from within despite not being SpongeBob’s dream but those dreams can even be popped by SpongeBob’s interference. Objects created in the dream world can deal damage to the real world and characters from SpongeBob’s dreams can even hurt the dream selves of a character which ends up causing the real version of said character to take the same kind of damage as well.

Non-Physical Interaction

Ghosts are often a problem for the residents of Bikini Bottom but luckily for them, they can all interact with ghosts with little issue. More specifically, SpongeBob has been able to interact with and harm the Flying Dutchman throughout the series and he could harm his ghostly minions in plenty of video games.

Time Travel (Debatable)

Technically speaking, SpongeBob could potentially be time travelling here as he seems to be physically present for all of these events. However, the comic leaves it unclear if SpongeBob is simply recounting these events that are simply visualized for the reader’s sake. SpongeBob also seemed to have time travelled via leaving his own comic but we have even less context for this cover.

Imagination Negation

In order to stop a kid’s wild imagination and all the creations that come with it, SpongeBob would have to do the unthinkable. He would have to remind each and every imagination-based creation of the real world, only needing to mention words such as jobs, math equations, taxes, and doing the dishes in order to forcefully dispel them altogether.

Supernatural Luck

Wouldn’t you know it, SpongeBob gets away with a lot because he seems to have an insane amount of luck backing him up. There should have been plenty of times where SpongeBob should have failed and been hurt by his greatest enemies but the odds always manage to fall into his favor. Don’t believe me? Well, the most obvious case would be in the episode Life Insurance where SpongeBob believes that a simple piece of paper is granting him an immense amount of luck that actively protects him from any and all harm for as long as he holds onto it. By the end of the episode, Mr. Krabs would tell SpongeBob what life insurance actually was, meaning that SpongeBob did not gain any actual luck from the paper. All of that was his own innate luck that came to be because of his belief in the power of life insurance. Even when he gave Squidward that paper and he started to gain his own good luck, he still had believed that the life insurance granted good luck, but once the truth was realized, Squidward would lose all that good luck that he actually had earlier in the episode. Said good luck redirects attacks onto others, causes general harm to barely miss, and it can force tough foes to accidentally defeat themselves while SpongeBob stays unharmed.

Besides the life insurance episode, too many events have worked tremendously in SpongeBob’s favor. When Kevin would try to make SpongeBob partake in all sorts of dangerous tasks, not only does SpongeBob easily do them unharmed but Kevin would always be on the receiving end of the pain. In the first SpongeBob movie, Dennis’ attempt at stepping on SpongeBob would be met with a conveniently timed boat collision; that’s not mentioning the fact that SpongeBob and Patrick somehow avoided harm while carelessly trekking through the Trench as well as their last tear conveniently kickstarting a chain reaction that brought them back from being completely dried out. Sandy’s karate master would constantly try to harm the sponge but SpongeBob, who was unaware the entire time, would accidentally dodge and intercept every attack of his. Hell, the most recent movie would literally have SpongeBob fail to remove his curse by sunset but just when the Flying Dutchman thought he won, plot armor would kick in and the sun would randomly start to come back up, giving SpongeBob enough time to actually remove the curse and win. Even when SpongeBob messes up, the world will always make sure that something as tragic as Plankton getting the formula doesn’t ever happen. In fact, SpongeBob’s presence alone ruins Plankton’s plan even when it seems like Plankton is all but successful in getting the secret formula. Avoiding all of Squidward’s attacks over the course of an entire night while he was sleeping, accidentally putting out a fire with an out of control hose, creating a delightful menu item after tripping, popping a fish’s head after missing his move, the list goes on. Granted, it’s not like SpongeBob is consistently lucky his entire life as he’s had just as many instances of bad luck as good, but even still, the things that his luck can do are absurd.

Fourth Wall Awareness/Breaking

SpongeBob has become very aware of his cartoony nature to the point of constantly acknowledging and breaking the fourth wall in a variety of ways. He obviously knows that he’s in a cartoon but he has entered the fourth wall to talk to the viewer, acknowledged that he is in a comic before immediately going back on it, met the pirate from his theme song for advice, sang his own theme song in-universe, interacted with scene transitions, has left his comic, has technically gone to our real world on a few occasions, and could constantly talk to and interact with the audience in the SpongeBob Squarepants 4-D Ride.

Scene Transitions

Technically an extension to SpongeBob’s fourth wall breaking abilities. SpongeBob can use the literal scene transitions to teleport from one scene to another instantaneously or he can just break the concept of space by crossing over a screen split.

Immersion

Not only has SpongeBob immersed himself into media and just as easily escaped it but he can also manipulate the media in question to force others to fall in. Not only would SpongeBob be able to immerse himself into one of Squidward’s paintings, enter a TV program by going through his TV’s wire, physically enter one of Plankton’s screens, and become a tattoo on a guy’s body, but he and Patrick could pull down the movie screen itself to force their boss to fly into the movie itself. Given that SpongeBob and other characters could easily throw food at the screen and hit the boss who is now inside the movie, SpongeBob can just interact with fictional media very casually. At its most terrifying, SpongeBob can continuously mess with pre-established media to insert himself into every possible scenario to remind Squidward of their Friendaversary, doing so without ever needing to physically walk into these pages/screens.

Screaming

A loud enough scream let SpongeBob push a building all the way to another city.

Explosions

Whether it’s SpongeBob shooting out fireworks from his body when he got into the Christmas spirit, colliding into guys hard enough to make them explode into nothing, utilizing rocket skates to make Squidward blow up into fireworks, or the time when a clown stepped on and bounced him into the sky hard enough to make him explode into confetti, SpongeBob naturally has plenty of ways to just blow you up altogether. He can figuratively blow up in your face but more relevantly, he can also self-destruct by blowing himself up before he then easily puts himself back together. He could even be capable of hitting people hard enough to cause nuclear explosions or getting them mad enough to explode on their own volition, similar to what other characters like Stanley, Mr. Krabs, Sandy, and other random characters are capable of doing.

Broadway Force

His musical numbers directly apply SpongeBob’s imagination to the world around him as he can make imaginary backgrounds visible in the real world, turn the sun into a bubble, turn into the planet, and create constellations that remind him of his favorite snail. SpongeBob’s broadway force would be at its peak performance during the SpongeBob musical as every resident of Bikini Bottom would be forced to join into the musical number along with the newly-summoned backup dancers.

Item Creation

Given SpongeBob’s immense imagination, it shouldn’t be surprising that he can just make anything appear in his hands from thin air. He’s created food from nothing despite the plot being centered around their lack of food, he’s spun around fast enough to make clothes appear, and he can always pull items out of his body that should never have been there to begin with. Somehow, SpongeBob can even create items out of thin air and drop them onto you despite being below you (it’s unclear on what this ability would fall under but this one feels like the safest bet).

Life Creation

Chef Bob was originally a hand puppet that was used by SpongeBob to get around his stage fright and cook in front of everyone. Soon enough however, the puppet would end up becoming alive as it gained its own sentience. Even when it would be far removed from SpongeBob’s hand, the puppet would still be alive and end up hosting its own cooking show. Besides puppets, SpongeBob has brought rocks to life to drive them for miles, he made his chair and desk act like a horse, and all the paintings of SpongeBob would come to life and chase Squidward once he started laughing. He can even force inanimate objects to come to life by creating a special static spark via rubbing his socks on the floor.

Forced Copying

Simply doing a crude imitation of SpongeBob can subsequently force YOU to become another SpongeBob. Even if it’s just a messy coat of paint and a bad vocal performance, characters would begin to turn into SpongeBob in both appearance and mind while their consciousness would be trapped within their own brain.

Shadow Puppets

By creating a shadow puppet from afar, said shadow is able to interact with the world like it is physically present. Unfortunately this wouldn’t help SpongeBob get down from the roof as he would just scare poor Squidward away.

BFR

By flipping a Krabby Patty hard enough, SpongeBob could send it to a completely separate plane of reality. Whoops! He has also accidentally sent numerous quarters flying to an unknown place that he isn’t aware of, with said quarters only returning by the end of the episode.

Breaking Space

There are an amount of instances of SpongeBob simply creating entire pocket realities from nothing, somehow compressing these giant spaces into such tiny areas. He’s created an exact replica of Squidward’s house inside his pineapple home without needing to increase its space, made Clarinet Land within Squidward’s locker without affecting its external size, and he could fit entire galaxies worth of space within the Krusty Krab’s kitchen. He can also kick around holes in the ground as if they were tangible objects.

Breaking Gravity

Through unexplainable means, SpongeBob could stay afloat while he rotated the planet despite the fact that Patrick found himself flying into the sky and then back into the ground. He can also ignore gravity to walk up walls, stand on the ceiling, float in the air, and affect how much he and his belongings weigh without any noted change to their mass. He can also force preexisting objects to disobey gravity whenever he needs them to, at least until someone else touches those objects.

DNA Fusing

By hugging Patrick too hard while fueled by the power of friendship, SpongeBob would manage to merge with him on the cellular level, turning them into one singular being while retaining select features on their body and their original personalities within their DNA. It doesn’t just work with these two however as anyone that SpongeBob considers a friend can instantly merge with him through physical contact, allowing for multiple characters to take up the same body at once. The only way to reverse this process is to disrupt the positive charged ionic energy that binds everyone together through a persistent amount of negative charged ionic energy that is channeled through pure annoyance and hatred. Even then however, SpongeBob may be too attached to his friend to detach from their body as he isn’t the kind of guy to leave his friends behind.

Matter Merging

Generally speaking, SpongeBob also has the ability to merge himself with literally anything he comes across. He merged with Squidward’s flower after Squidward tried to bury him, he could seamlessly merge into Squidward’s canvas to the point of looking more like a canvas than himself, and he can hide from others by merging into nearby walls.

Time Stopping

Although SpongeBob hasn’t really used it in combat, he can still stop time to an extent. He can either stop his own flow of time or stop time around him to let out a quip before he gets splattered by goo.

“The Power Of Friendship”

According to SpongeBob, the power of friendship is potent enough to where he could become superhumanly strong and bring down a bell that he previously couldn’t ring. He also gained a superhero suit and the ability to fly alongside it.

Super Breath

Even without his spinach, Popeye’s lungs are abnormally strong and have given the power that Popeye needs to blow away his competition. He’s blown hard enough to get entire ships to make headway, blown hard enough to send tons of quicksand flying, blown his tiny sailboat across an ocean’s worth of distance, blown trains off their rails, blown hard enough into a pipe to send people flying out of the ground, and he can send his breath through telephone lines and into a lighthouse to blow it to smithereens. Popeye’s sneezes alone have been able to cause tidal waves and are considered to be hurricanes’ worth of power, and that power only increases once he actually eats his spinach.

With spinach, Popeye can blow waves hard enough to send them flying thousands of feet into the air, sucked ships back on course, blown away a city’s worth of fog in one go, blown away entire islands, blown clouds into space, and he has such a great control over his breath that he used it to construct an entire building. In battle, that super breath is strong and precise enough to send incoming projectiles flying back towards the enemies that tried to attack him, whether it’d be thrown blades or groups of arrows.

Super Yell

Popeye’s got a yell strong enough to knock people off their feet but also, more impressively, a yell strong enough to cause entire ships to fly into the air.

Transmutation

Popeye’s greater control over reality is what allows Popeye to access one of his most iconic moves. By simply punching his enemy with enough force, he can forcefully transform them into any object of his choosing. The common belief is that Popeye needs spinach to perform transmutation but he has, in fact, accomplished transmutation without the use of spinach. He’s turned bulls into meat, bulls into cans of meat, giant birds into turkeys, crocodiles into all sorts of clothes and bags, whales into oil tanks, whales into submarines, human skeletons into dinosaur skeletons, Native Americans into coins, Brutus into a rocket, motorcycles into tricycles, lightning into jewelry, Zeus into lightning, the list goes on and on. Those same punches could also construct entire cabins and lighthouses and Popeye doesn’t even need to throw hands to activate his transmutation. Simply coming into contact with Popeye’s body has resulted in transmutation, whether it’d be Popeye falling onto spikes or bulls charging straight for him, so his body can act like a passive shield that transmutes danger on its own accord.

Once his powers are boosted by spinach, they gain all new properties that make them especially broken. Look at the time where Popeye tried to transmute this guy into a turkey but he would easily be able to bounce back and turn back into his normal self. However, spinach power would give Popeye a level of transmutation strong enough to completely overcome this guy’s resistance, permanently turning him into a coin with the implication being that he was gone for good. Spinach power also allows Popeye’s transmutation to be applied to objects that he isn’t directly touching. Whether it’d be his pipe’s flames, his sword, bullets, his enemies, his plane, or just anything that he’s got trapped or throws at targets, physical contact is no longer a necessity. He can even reflect attacks thrown at him while imbuing them with transmutating properties to transmutate from afar.

Disassembly

Technically an extension of transmutation but it’s unique enough to where we can separate it. Through the same method as transmutation, Popeye can punch a target hard enough to instead split them into multiple smaller, and ultimately weaker, versions of themselves. He’s punched tanks into toy tanks, a living violin into four mini living violins, a clock into many clocks and watches, a giant fish into free sardines, an ape into three monkeys, a clone of himself into mini versions, etc. A little spinach power will also let Popeye disassemble objects back into their base materials.

Flight

Popeye has taken to the skies by spinning his arms fast enough to create force, flapping his arms to freely fly through the skies, or eating his daily dose of spinach to fly in many unorthodox ways.

Teleportation

Through the simple incantation that Popeye stole from the Sea Hag’s evil spell book, Popeye can teleport others far away by speaking it aloud. Unfortunately he would prove his inexperience as it was accidentally used on himself. At the very least, his spinach gives him a greater control over his magic as he could later teleport others wherever he pleased, even when those characters were out of Popeye’s sight. Popeye’s also got a different spell that lets him teleport in and out of paintings.

Besides his magic, Popeye’s cartoony nature just lets him teleport instantly across shorter distances, across distances that lets him chase down runaway foes, or debatably punch you hard enough to teleport you to hell.

Shapeshifting

Popeye’s greater control over his body lets him change his shape and properties into anything that he can use to beat the snot out of you. Without spinach, Popeye can shapeshift select parts of his bodies into the likes of hand crushers, handmade hammers, and even ram heads, but the true shapeshifting power is unlocked once spinach gets into his system. His hands can be turned into spinach-powered bombs, chainsaws, guns, hammers and other useful weapons. On top of that, he can turn his entire body into that of animals, objects, or natural phenomena in order to improve his mobility, deal with foes, or stonewall incoming danger.

Duplication

After a chow down on some spinach, Popeye can create a select number of clones to help him beat the snot out of Brutus. We’ve only seen him create up to 5 clones at once but he can also create clones through speed, allowing him to be in multiple places at once.

Elemental Control

Fire Control: Popeye can run fast enough to set the road and surrounding structures on fire, he can create sparks with just a snap of his fingers, and spinach allows him to release flames from his hands, letting him propel through the air. He also seems to have a general control over his heat as he could boil the ocean just by eating his spinach.

Ice Control: Not only are his kisses able to freeze you in an ice cube but his breath can freeze some wet concrete into a complete road. That icy breath is even able to freeze fire solid for prolonged periods of time.

Water Control: As you could imagine, Popeye would need to take control of the oceans if he wanted to conquer them. With spinach, Popeye can physically grab the ocean and calm it down or he can throw objects into the ocean, influencing its behavior via creating a giant watery hand to grab Popeye’s enemies and throw them back his direction. Even without it, he can just straight up walk on water and tie up two separate water streams together like a bow.

Non-Physical Interaction

The intangible and non-existent will never find themself safe from Popeye’s grasp. Whether it’d be all types of ghosts, genies that are meant to be completely intangible from every human, speech bubbles and other sounds, elements/natural phenomena that can’t be physically held, mirages, the literal black void that surrounds his cartoon, the good/bad sides of his consciousness, or potentially literal concepts of the universe such as Last Year and Baby New Year, nothing is out of Popeye’s reach. That last one is debatable as they could simply be physical/spiritual characters that represent concepts but they are still meant to be abstract beings so take that how you will.

Telekinesis

Once he’s gotten his fill of spinach, Popeye can tap into his source of innate magic (that he apparently had this whole time) and use his telekinetic powers to bend his targets out of shape. This magician thought that bending forks was impressive but Popeye took it to the next level by bending an entire lamppost. Given his supposed mastery over telekinesis, Popeye could likely replicate the feats accomplished by the magician’s own telekinesis. He could not only bend forks in half and move objects around but his magic can work so long as he has a visual. Even when you’re at home and he’s on your TV, he can still apply telekinesis to those that are quite the distance away.

Besides established magic, Popeye’s been able to control plenty of objects from a distance, whether that’d be manipulating rope to take complex shapes and tie up knots or causing spinach cans to float above his head so that his trapped body could still get ahold of its power.

Attack Reflection

It’s been mentioned a few times prior but if you ever try to send any attack in Popeye’s direction, whether it’s physical or energy-based, you’ll more likely than not find your own attack hurling straight back towards you. Popeye can casually punch in-motion projectiles back into the enemies that used them, his super breath can be used to redirect attacks, and most notably, being amped with spinach allows him to deflect the likes of lightning and magic with his punches. His body can also passively reflect those projectiles on some occasions.

Body Swapping

Funny enough, this isn’t specifically an ability of Popeye’s but it seems to be replicable by everyone in his world. Butting heads with someone triggers a body swap, forcibly swapping around the minds and voices of Popeye and his target while trapping them in each other’s body. Wimpy claims that it only occurs because of select amnesia, with the only solution being to whack them on the noggin again to restore their real selves. Speaking of Wimpy, he and Olive could achieve the same and even Brutus would be affected at the end of the episode.

Fourth Wall Awareness/Breaking

Popeye has become very aware of the fourth wall over the years, often recognizing the medium that he’s in alongside other characters and noticing the mistakes that people make outside of his comic. He recognizes when he’s being watched by an audience and he seems to be very familiar with Paramount given the times where he’s met the company’s executives and even created the logo while defeating Bluto. Sometimes he’ll just punch you out of your own comic entirely or make a cameo in a completely unrelated comic strip altogether. He’s no slouch when it comes to manipulating the fourth wall or leaving it entirely as he’s broken through the borders of his comic panels, read the subtitles of his cartoon, left his comic/cartoon world altogether, and even manipulated parts of his cartoon, parts such as…

Screen Transitions

Popeye’s gotten a hold of the screen transitions themselves to either teleport himself and others without moving an inch or to detach himself from his world to catch some Z's. On that latter example, other characters have managed to manipulate that black space in ways that Popeye should be able to replicate. The Sheik used that black space to entrap Olive and send her plummeting to his basement and Shorty’s teleported Popeye with a screen transition.

Immersion

Like a lot of other cartoon characters of his time, Popeye has casually broken the barrier between fiction and reality, often jumping into or out of his media with no issue. Whether it’d be his own posters, paintings that he chooses to hide in, or his very own comic panels, you can’t keep a good sailor trapped in paper, and Popeye can also just reach into drawings and interact with them as if they were tangible objects/people. A little bit of spinach can grant Popeye the ability to go through painted holes as if he were Roadrunner, and despite Brutus’ attempt at doing the same, he would fail to go through the hole. Those properties even apply to the likes of tattoos as Popeye’s tattoos can deal direct damage to others tattoos and drastically affect their state as if they were real; it’s not the most useful ability but he can just do that I guess.

In terms of offense, he can just straight up punch you into or through other media but Popeye’s immersion is mainly useful for when he needs to reach for some spinach. He’s occasionally reached into spinach paintings, crushed the spinach out of his phone, or simply eats the spinach off of giant billboards, but he abused this the most when his movie self was in a pickle as the “real” Popeye could interact with and change the plot of the movie by feeding his movie self spinach. If Popeye doesn’t like your ability to exit your original medium, then his boosted powers can punch you back into your media and lock you up within said media, preventing you from leaving altogether.

Explosions

By flexing his biceps after eating spinach, Popeye can simply just… blow himself up. He also blew up the whale that he was inside of but don’t worry, he’ll walk it off.

Summoning

If spinach cans are what the sailor needs, then Popeye can simply whistle them to his side or send them abstract SOS messages to bring them to life. From there, the cans will head in Popeye’s direction and give him the nutrition he needs. He can also just pray to goddesses to summon them and gain spinach as a result.

Invisibility

An ounce of spinach power can make Popeye turn completely invisible even up against ghosts. He should also be able to turn anything he throws invisible like what Bluto did with spinach power.

Hypnotism

Having learnt the technique from Brutus’ copy of “How To Hypnotize”, Popeye can simply snap his fingers and hypnotize a select target under his command. This technique would not only be used to snap Olive out of Brutus’ hypnotism but Popeye would give Brutus a taste of his own medicine by hypnotizing him and Alice into loving each other. Being under Popeye’s hypnosis can also enable him to make you levitate in the air for no real reason.

Item Creation

The simple act of waving his hand around lets him create objects out of thin air, somehow being a consistent technique across his cartoon shorts. Everything from slices of bread to tiles to cans of spinach have appeared out of thin air. It’s almost like magic but in truth, it is just cartoon logic at full force. He can block your view by pulling down a window shade from the air, he can create heavy ovens to smack you with, and he can punch you while bringing appropriate items into existence for a punchline. Spinach accomplishes similar feats, being surprisingly consistent among instances where Popeye could create entirely new clothes from nothing but spinach power.

Restoration

Through various physical gestures, Popeye’s repaired ripped clothes, immediately repaired a door he broke through, put a ticket back together after sucking up all its pieces, and like the good samaritan he is, he waved a guy’s crashed car back into its original self. Utilizing the power of spinach, said power can be transferred into items like swords and rope to fix them up, good as new!

Absorption

Spinach does wonders in terms of absorbing the elements. Popeye’s not only absorbed tons of gas upon spinach consumption but, more notably, Popeye has completely absorbed any and all lightning that strikes him. Upon absorbing it, he can not only turn himself into a lightning bolt and shoot across the sky but that lightning energy can also act like a defense that will zap anyone that touches him. Given that Popeye has absorbed a city’s worth of electricity from a singular lightning bolt, it’s safe to say that his lightning powers pack a punch.

Magnetization

As a result of the spinach’s hefty amount of iron, Popeye can empower his arms and temporarily turn them into magnets. It proves useful whenever Popeye needs to bring metal objects to him or he can imbue metal objects with magnetic properties to achieve the same effect. Theoretically, Popeye could also separate the iron found in other objects like spinach if Sweet Pea and some random rogue is anything to go by.

Imagination

On that note, Popeye can just create anything with his imagination alone. Need some spinach on the fly? Simply just imagine it. Other characters can just as easily imagine items into existence so it seems like a consistent ability among humans in Popeye’s world.

Besides imagination, anything he draws can turn into real objects that actually affect the world; for example, Popeye would draw a sun in Bluto’s mouth and cause his mouth to actually set ablaze with fire. His artist skills would allow him to draw spinach cans into existence and carve wooden spinach cans that somehow had actual spinach in them. Beyond drawings however, Popeye can accomplish many things as long as he believes in it. He can drive around in imaginary vehicles, create cartoon characters that gain sentience and can react to the world outside of their cartoon, turn the intangible stars that circle around dizzy characters into actual tangible objects, turn words into physical objects that he can grab/attack with, and basically anything else that he can wish for.

Size Shifting

Spinach–powered punches can effortlessly shrink or grow any target that Popeye wishes to affect. His punches and other attacks can obviously achieve this effect but he has also just scared sharks hard enough for them to shrink out of fear, plus he can apply his size-changing abilities to whatever item he’s holding.

Morality/Emotional Shifting

The effects of spinach works wonders on those that were guided down a path of evil. Whether it’d be breaking up street brawls and pacifying every fighter there, turning evil robots to the good side, or pacifying every Martian of Mars that was currently engulfed by war, a simple punch or spinach energy beam is enough to completely remove their desire to fight.

If someone were too naughty however, there’s a non-zero chance that Popeye can punch you hard enough to leave you crying like a big baby. He’s certainly made Bluto cry on multiple occasions despite it going directly against his character, plus Popeye always makes sure to leave Bluto in baby-related situations. This kind of effect isn’t exclusive to Bluto either as Popeye is willing to babify anyone he considers an enemy.

Disintegration

A hard enough punch has easily disintegrated stone rollers into dust. It’s unclear if this is just pure strength or an ability of his but he can do it regardless.

Dream Invasion

On more than one occasion, Popeye’s been prone to messing with the dreams of others by entering them. He can not only share your thought bubble and become a part of your dream unintentionally but the real world Popeye seems to be able to interact with said dreams. This only seems to be possible while Popeye is sleeping however.

Dream-Based Precognition

Whenever Popeye takes a snooze, he has the chance to foresee future events that could put him and others in grave danger. He has no real control over what events will be foreseen but should he be ready to act on those future visions, those dreams can prove to be extremely helpful against danger that Popeye would have never predicted otherwise.

Broadway Force

Spinach-powered punches have the capability to make you forcefully dance upon being hit, leaving you wide open for an attack.

Clairvoyance

Technically speaking, Popeye doesn’t even need the crystal ball from earlier! Once spinach-powered, he can simply flex his bicep and create a temporary crystal ball that will show him the whereabouts of his target. In this case, it let Popeye see where Olive ran off to after he had lost her earlier.

Damage Transferral

Boxing gets real serious when Popeye is out here punching a single boxer and accidentally causing the entire audience to feel that pain. Granted, it’s not the full power blow but the pain is enough to cause severe cramps in everyone’s stomachs. It wouldn’t be the only instance as that pain can also be transferred to inanimate objects and it can even target specific individuals no matter how far they are from Popeye’s original target.

Biological Manipulation

Whenever Popeye needed an animal to do his bidding, he would merely change major parts of their biology to get them to do what he wanted. Pulling a horse’s tail let him swap its head and tail to ride it in the right direction, pulling an elephant’s tail let him shrink its trunk, and giving a lion a bump on the head let Popeye morph it into a crown. Horrifyingly, this also extends to Popeye being able to turn a crocodile inside out. Spinach consumed by animals can also accelerate their own biological abilities such as a chicken’s ability to lay eggs in shorter time periods. Besides animals, he has also rolled away people’s body fat, knocked the skin off a person which left only their skeleton behind, and punched a Native American chief… into Ghandi. No comment.

Age Regression

A focused spinach-powered punch managed to revert Brutus back to a baby.

“Open Sesame”

Originating from Ali Babi and The Forty Thieves, the words open sesame are regarded as magical words that will open any door if the words are said aloud. In Popeye’s world, those words do actually have a magical power behind them as everything from solid rock doors to padlocks to Popeye’s spinach cans automatically open under its influence. The phrase can likely open anything else that can be opened if it’s within Popeye’s vicinity.

Life Creation

It shouldn’t be too much of a surprise at this point but because of Popeye’s likeness alone, inanimate objects that were made to resemble Popeye’s appearance can end up springing to life and fight on their own accord. For example, Popeye would carve a statue of himself that would soon be threatened by a crazy guy with a hammer, but instead of just standing there, the statue would grab its own spinach, consume it, and then beat the crap out of that guy. Similarly, a photo of Popeye would constantly avoid Bluto’s attacks and get him in trouble through the destruction of everything but the painting. Technically speaking, a movie character that resembled Popeye should not have had sentience due to being an animated production, and yet Popeye in the real world gave it sentience by offering it spinach and letting that character break free from the events that were supposed to occur.

It’s not just objects with Popeye’s likeness that are brought to life however. He has chiseled statues to life, punched a lightning bolt to life and made it drown (which in turn brought the storming clouds to life as they would flee out of fear), he would splash paint onto a sun within a painting which brought it to life, and he has scared away fire upon consuming his spinach.

Breaking Physics

As generally benefitting these sorts of cartoons, Popeye loves to break physics whenever he can. Inertia is ignored by Popeye in cases where he casually freezes in midair while in motion, slows down anything he touches, halts his opponent’s momentum while he sends them flying, halts a whirlpool’s spinning without destroying it, etc. Gravity becomes a myth when Popeye wishes to slide up poles or when he eats his spinach and begins falling upward instead of downward. In fact, spinach seems to reverse his momentum outright, usually in ways that will lend him a victory. One such case includes the time when Popeye ate spinach while he was sent flying through the air, and by bending his body into a boomerang-like shape, Popeye could fly back to his original location and take his foes by surprise. Entire concepts such as color would additionally be broken by Popeye in unorthodox ways.

On a similar note, baseballs thrown by Popeye can have their trajectory be completely shifted, defying both inertia and gravity just to prevent his sons from hitting that sweet home run. Plates also act on their own volition as they continuously track Popeye’s targets, meaning that anything Popeye throws can essentially be turned into a homing attack. Bluto would accomplish something similar when he eats his spinach, a feat which is impressive given that spinach tends to reject Bluto’s body.

Breaking Space

The mere concept of space is a joke within Popeye itself as characters are able to break the laws of space entirely. For example, imagine a hole in the ground. It should be physically impossible to move such a thing while keeping it intact but Popeye does the impossible around here. He can push around a preexisting hole on an object without destroying it, whether that would be a hole in a plank, a window in a wall, or shifting entire ground-connected swimming pools over a little to the right without destroying said pool. Beyond holes, Popeye’s manipulated space to hide in extremely small places, punch lions inside of each other without affecting their size, and Popeye could punch one end of a periscope to transfer damage across it and hurt the person on the other side. It’s even implied that Popeye’s instances of breaking his comic panels ends up causing him to skip over space as Popeye managed to collapse 1500 miles worth of distance within moments.

Popeye isn’t the only one who breaks space either. Other Popeye characters can simply lift holes off the ground and carry them around while it still has the properties of a hole, or they can just shatter the concept of perspective and distance entirely. Given that Popeye already has plenty of space-breaking moments, he should likely be able to replicate the bullshit that other characters have done.

Breaking Time

Time is as easily broken as space is in Popeye’s hands. Whether it’d be leaving his cartoon and travelling to different points in time, managing to open a portal to the present day (it’s unclear if 1929 Popeye or present day Popeye accomplished this), and walking to the future to see what happens next in his life, time doesn’t stop for this sailor. He may also have the ability to time travel as he’s went to warn his past self before, albeit we don’t know how Popeye time-traveled to begin with. That same panel-breaking from before also seems to let Popeye skip ahead in time, jumping ahead to a point in the story to where he would get his spinach after he had been falling off a building. Speaking of spinach, it should grant him the ability to break the time barrier and go back in time like how a spinach-fueled space pod could, plus he can just punch you into another time period because he feels like it.

Breaking Matter

Cartoon logic dictates that Popeye’s able to squeeze water out of anchors, zip non-metal people and objects up with a zipper (other characters can also do this!), and affect their molecular structure to the point of stretching and squashing like rubber. Maybe he is just really strong though. It doesn’t really explain his spinach-powered ability to merge with the material around him, whether it’d be merging with a radiator to turn into a torpedo or merging with a nuke to turn into a cool ass robot but I bet YOU couldn’t do this.

Power Nullification

Spinach has the potential to cancel out others' victories but the same can also be said for the powers that one holds. When driven by spinach, Popeye can cancel out the newfound rock powers of Brutus without needing to destroy the stone, he could cancel out the intangibility of ghosts by turning them into physical sheets, the shapeshifting ability of aliens would immediately be cancelled out by one of Popeye’s punches, and the clones of Brutus that Popeye could only knock out before could be completely obliterated after Popeye had eaten his spinach.

Paralysis

Being high off spinach gives the power to just Popeye negate your movement altogether. Brawling with three monkeys at once saw an outcome where the monkeys were forced to freeze in place in poses that oddly referenced the three wise monkeys. In a different short, Popeye managed to restrain Bluto’s movement near instantaneously when he was covered in clay; Bluto would still be able to move while he was covered in clay but Popeye’s act of striking that clay and sculpting it around him would cause it to dry instantaneously and completely immobilize him. Spinach-powered Popeye should also be able to replicate the feat of this random turkey that turned a group of Native Americans into a living totem pole with its punches.

Astral Projection

Oddly enough, Popeye seems to have the consistent ability of continuing the fight as a spirit, often having his soul project and sometimes even separate from his body entirely. In the most famous case of this, Popeye’s spirit could temporarily leave his body to give the real Popeye a pep talk and wake him up from his previous beating during a boxing match. However, Popeye’s been able to continue living on as a spirit even when his physical body seemed to have died. The original context of this scene is a bit confusing as it would later be revealed that the supernatural luck of a Whiffle Hen feather had actually failed to kill Popeye outright. Despite this, the implication is that it only allowed Popeye’s physical body to live, and since his spirit leaving his body is a completely separate factor, it was Popeye himself who accomplished this.

This astral projection may also be consistent across the verse as Olive accidentally showcased a similar ability when she died. RIP.

Soul Manipulation?

After killing both Braccio and the Sea Hag, their spirits would begin to ascend to heaven. Popeye wouldn’t approve of this however as he would punch their spirits hard enough to instead send them falling into hell. Yes, really.

Technology Overloading

Kissing a robot while fueled by spinach would let Popeye overwhelm a robot to the point of going crazy. Given that the Sea Hag had sent the robot to blow him up, Popeye would quite literally make everything blow up in Sea Hag’s face.

Automatic Translation

Not the most useful of abilities but man, it would have been real useful against Saitama…

Forms

Invicibubble

With the power of the magic page, SpongeBob could transform himself into his heroic alter-ego Invicibubble. Not only does he gain a muscular body that absolutely dwarfs his original size but he gains complete control over bubbles for his superpower. By either using the bubble wand at the top of his head or his hands, SpongeBob can create bubbles that can entrap targets and levitate them into the air or create a stream of bubbles that lets him flood streets and propel himself through the air.

WereDoodle


Whenever SpongeBob holds a pencil up to a beam of moonlight, the light will shine into his eyes and he will be forcibly transformed into the scary WereDoodle. As a WereDoodle, SpongeBob turns completely feral in behavior while scoring an appearance similar to DoodleBob (minus the ears, claws, and teeth of course). He also gains abilities like effortlessly being able to immerse himself into media by jumping into it, using that immersion to teleport from a poster to a chalkboard, and using the previously mentioned pencil to draw whatever he wants into existence, including living things that will attack others on their own volition. If he ever needs a pencil, he can just carve one into existence. That form will usually last for hours, and once he does turn back to normal, SpongeBob will have no recollection of those events. He may have had the curse removed by the end of the episode but he can always access it again by getting a papercut from DoodleBob.

Ghostly Form

When reduced to his ghostly self, whether that’d be through shifting in and out via powerups, his own astral projection, or forcefully being turned into a spirit, SpongeBob is far from powerless in this state. Basic ghosts in SpongeBob’s world have the innate ability to phase through surfaces, grab objects while being intangible, shapeshift into whatever they want, create objects out of thin air, and possess both objects and living beings alike. That’s not to mention the previously established regeneration that ghosts have whenever they’re taken apart. SpongeBob specifically has managed to take the form of the Flying Dutchman himself, which while it was a costume, he somehow accessed and used abilities such as intangibility and teleporting in his fight against his friends. He did also gain a weakness to light in the process but that’s just ghosts for ya.

On a related note, did you know that SpongeBob’s spatula has a soul? Well, it did. When SpongeBob was turned into a ghost by the Flying Dutchman and needed to grab his spatula, it would just fall right through his hands. The obvious solution would be to snap the spatula and force the soul out of it… despite it being an inanimate object. That way, he would be able to grab it with little issue.

Ghostly Form

After his body had seemingly died to a backstabbing, Popeye would be able to project his soul out of his body and continue his fight against The Smog/the Sea Hag. In this new form, Popeye can freely fly around as a spirit and is presumably intangible due to his ghost-like nature. Even without his main body however, Popeye’s still has access to abilities that let him turn the Smog into butterflies and while also purifying it in the process. It is only because of his pure soul that he would be able to remove the Smog and clear its townwide corruption from Sweethaven’s residents. Once all is said and done, Popeye can choose to return to his body as if nothing had happened.

Enraged State

Don’t get Popeye too mad because even when he is stripped of his spinach, he can build up enough rage to enter a unique state of mind and power. His eye turns green, green lightning starts to release from his eye, and the lovable sailor turns into a bloodlusted warrior that will do anything to defeat those who threatened his loved ones. This enraged power pulls from the same kind of power source that Popeye’s spinach power comes from, but unlike spinach, it bypasses the same power nullification that could suck away spinach power. It’s implied that Popeye also gets a massive boost in his stats when he activates this state, albeit his rage causes him to attack without restraint or any real control.

Feats

Accomplishments

  • Is well known as the most popular cartoon sponge in all of fiction
  • Became one of the best fry cooks in all of Bikini Bottom
  • Remains dedicated to his job and to protecting the secret formula
  • Has saved Bikini Bottom on multiple occasions
  • Teamed up with other Nickelodeon heroes to save their multiverse
  • Would eventually become the manager of Krusty Krab 2
  • Is currently carrying the lifespan of the Nickelodeon channel

Physical Might

Speed

Toughness

Endurance

Accomplishments

  • Is well regarded as the most popular cartoon sailor in all of fiction
  • Fought in World War II
  • Managed to find his Pappy after years of searching
  • Always gave the bad and the evil the smacking they deserved
  • Helped boost spinach consumption within the U.S. by 33%
  • Eventually married Olive
  • Was essentially the reason for Mario’s existence

Physical Might

Cartoon Popeye without spinach has…

Comic Popeye without spinach has…

Cartoon Popeye with spinach has…

Comic Popeye with spinach has…

Speed

Cartoon Popeye without spinach has…

Comic Popeye without spinach has…

Cartoon Popeye with spinach has…

Comic Popeye with spinach has…

Toughness

Cartoon Popeye without spinach has…

Comic Popeye without spinach has…

Cartoon Popeye with spinach has…

  • No notable feats. His spinach-powered self should generally upscale every other feat.

Comic Popeye with spinach has…

  • No notable feats. His spinach-powered self should generally upscale every other feat.

Endurance

Cartoon Popeye without spinach has…

Comic Popeye without spinach has…

Cartoon Popeye with spinach has…

  • No notable feats. It can generally be assumed that Popeye’s stamina is instantly restored back to its peak.

Comic Popeye with spinach has…

Scaling

The Residents of Bikini Bottom and Beyond

The Residents of Sweethaven and Beyond (And Spinach)

Weaknesses

He may be a hard worker and reliable sponge but SpongeBob would still have a lot going against him. Squidward would be validated in hating his goody two shoes neighbor in how naive, gullible, and overall childish SpongeBob can act at times. He may have experience in combat but he won’t always be willing to engage in battle out of his own cowardice. That isn’t to mention the great amount of bad luck that SpongeBob can still go through at any time even with his supernatural good luck.

Above all else, SpongeBob still finds himself vulnerable without moisture. He may be able to go above the surface just fine, especially with Bubbles’ blessing, but he can only stay on dry land for a limited amount of time. It may seem too inconsistent to be a concrete weakness but every other instance of him resisting heat gave him access to water while SpongeBob was almost permanently incapacitated in Shell City because of prolonged and focused heat. That’s not to mention the fact that he still relies on his water helmet to enter Sandy’s tree dome, meaning that his weakness of no water is still in the minds of the current series’ writers. Regenerating his moisture also doesn’t really mean anything when every instance of him doing so relies on him already being underwater.

The fact that Popeye seems as invincible as someone like Superman is absurd but just like the man of steel, even he has his faults. Popeye’s got a specific set of rules that he chooses to abide by whenever he throws himself into a scrap: no hitting women, no harming animals that can’t think on their own volition, and no fighting children as it would be too unfair. Even when he does engage in his fights, he’ll try his best to not kill his opponents, holding back his power if he can. As a man of his own word, he’ll usually honor the rules above by never choosing to break them.

Interestingly enough, Eye Lie Popeye would deal a proper blow to the spinach’s unstoppability as well. It’s been established before in previous shorts (The Fly’s Last Flight, Flies Ain’t Human, The Twisker Pitcher) that spinach power usually has a time limit of 2 to 5 minutes per can. However, spinach now also works on a limit of three great feats per spinach can, and depending on the size of the spinach can, Popeye may get less feats as a result. Of course, this isn’t mentioning the fact that Popeye’s spinach can be intercepted by a competent enough foe, and without his spinach, Popeye may be cooked. He does have his enraged form to fall back on but even then, it’ll still leave him in an uncontrollable rage.

Before the Verdict

So What’s Up With Their Feats?

A lot of questionable feats have popped up on both sides over the past few years so let’s try to see if they are truly viable or not.

SpongeBob Unravels The Universe

As one of SpongeBob’s most infamous feats, the unraveling of the universe obviously works on a universal level. The issue that some people may have with the feat is that it’s purely done through hax. The whole universe was turned into string before SpongeBob could unravel it so since that’s the case, is it really universal? Well at the bare minimum, SpongeBob’s string transmutation would work on a universal level since he was the one who directly caused it. However, that string is also holding the mass of the universe and SpongeBob is physically pulling said string to take the universe apart. It should work as a strength feat generally even if the universe itself is being turned into string.

If this were the only universal feat then it’d be completely fair to criticize it but even with the existence of other universal feats (more on that later), the fact that SpongeBob can casually act on such a scale does imply that the feat is nothing to him. His own strength tends to be inconsistent across the show but that’s just how SpongeBob is (you would put him at his strongest for debates anyways).

There are also arguments that push the string further, putting the feat at anywhere from nonillions times universal to multiversal. However, the latter relies on a lot of speculation (more on that later) and the former does overplay the feat quite a bit when it logistically doesn’t make sense. The mass of the string should not be so much greater than the universe when the string’s mass is meant to be equal to that of the universe. By compressing the universe into a string, only the density of the string would change instead of the mass. You could make further justifications for the feat but it would just make more sense to assume it’s baseline universal given that it’s, well… a single universe.

Patrick Survives Too Many Universe-Level Calamities

Unlike SpongeBob, Patrick has more than one universal feat to his name. He’s been sucked into a black hole that sucked up the universe, sucked up into another black hole that sucked up the universe, and he could even tear his animation hard enough to send it back to previous phases.

The first feat is… a bit questionable since we don’t see what happened to Patrick afterwards and it seems like the second falls into the same pit. We see that the whole universe is destroyed before it then cuts to a parallel universe where Man Ray is being arrested for his mass destruction. It isn’t made clear if the Man Ray in the parallel universe is the same as the one in the original universe and we seemingly don’t know what happened with Patrick’s family… except we do see what happened. Not only do characters actively remember what happened in the original universe but as the episode closes, we literally see that Patrick and his family end up in the same jail cell as Man Ray. Given the implication that their memories of everything stayed intact, these can’t be alternate versions of the og universe’s characters. It makes more sense to say that it’s just them outright, thus meaning that they survived the black hole that destroyed their universe. As for tearing his animation, it certainly doesn’t come off as any sort of universal feat. In fact, it seems a bit brainrotted to assume so. The thing is that SpongeBob’s entire universe is inherently just the cartoon itself. The frame that is ripped apart may be focused on a single moment in SpongeBob’s world but it still leaves the entire cartoon in temporary limbo as it’s taken back to the storyboards and script. It could function fine as a universal feat if you’re lenient enough.

Could SpongeBob Ever Have Inaccessible Speed?

To put it bluntly, the arguments are… alright. There’s been a lot of pushback on SpongeBob flipping that patty into another dimension, but in its defense, it’s not like it lacks any ground to stand on. The patty’s never stated to leave reality through speed alone but the point of SpongeBob’s flipping of the patty was to get the most patty rotations before it landed again. He needed to utilize the speed of his own spatula flip to get the patty to perform so many rotations, hence why he is being scaled to the patty to begin with. It could perhaps have been sent to another dimension through an ability but that is also not implied. Whether you buy it or not is up to you but it isn’t the worst argument out there. Besides the patty flip, there are also two other arguments that I’d yet to see brought up. That first feat is that of random seahorses that could SpongeBob and Patrick flying fast enough to send them to the past. It’s never made clear if this was done through speed, through an ability, or if this even occurred in real time. The end of the episode would make it seem like being in the past was all a dream but then it was made out to be real when the Squidward of medieval times came along with them? It’s a very confusing feat to use for inaccessible speed, let alone scaling it back to SpongeBob, but it is there I guess.

The other inaccessible feat would be Patrick physically running from the age of the dinosaurs to the present day. He is being chased by a T-Rex that also follows him to the present, he continuously carries heavy objects as he runs, and when he gets to the present, he has way more muscles than he did previously. On top of all that, Patrick's prior usage of the time closet shows us the visuals that would’ve been used if Patrick properly time travelled, and yet the visuals are completely different when Patrick runs to the present. The only real counter to the feat being inaccessible is that Patrick could have just been running on the Earth for millions of years, going through the ages as he kept running and running until he ended up back at his house. Visuals in that scene do questionably contradict that idea but either way, inaccessible speed is certainly debatable for The Bob.

Doesn’t SpongeBob Have Natural Plot Manipulation?

It’s not exactly a stat-related question but we should probably cover this. Directly coming from the SpongeBob comics, it seems like SpongeBob has two stories that give evidence for his innate plot bending abilities. The first case would see SpongeBob reacting to what Patrick is seemingly drawing in the empty panels while the second case makes it seem like SpongeBob put back together the comic that is currently making up the plot of this mini-story. When you reread these two comics however, it doesn’t really imply that SpongeBob himself has plot manipulation? In fact, it is you the reader who is determining the plot of said stories. With the former, you are drawing what happens while SpongeBob reacts to what’s being drawn. There might be an implication that Patrick is drawing it but ultimately, the reader is the one defining what story is being told. With the latter, Patrick’s comic technically already has told the story within its pages and when it’s torn apart, SpongeBob isn’t rewriting major parts of the story. He is simply rearranging the series of events that were already determined by the comic, and even when those panels are originally rearranged in the wrong order, it’s not like the story itself changed. Merely the presentation of what was gonna happen regardless was changed, and even with SpongeBob’s implication that rearranging panels would change the outcome of their story, that would moreso be attributed to the abilities of Patrick’s comic rather than SpongeBob’s own powers. Hell, the last panel on the first page implies that you are the one who is meant to arrange those panels back into their proper order. It just feels like weird evidence to use in relation to proving that SpongeBob has natural plot-bending abilities. Ending the show also doesn’t inherently mean you have plot manipulation unless it’s stated otherwise.

This won’t affect things too much as SpongeBob still has actual plot manipulation when using the Magic Book but this needed clarification still.

Is Popeye’s Film-Ripping Feat Really Ok?

To put it simply, its reasoning is about the same as Patrick’s own cartoon-ripping feat. The film strip makes up Popeye’s universe despite us only seeing a portion of his world and due to the film being an object that should transcend Popeye’s own universe and a structure that is composed of his universe’s space and time, ripping the film strip is impressive in its own right. Chalking it up as a simple fourth wall feat does kind of miss the point as the film strip was literally destroyed and prevented Popeye’s universe from moving forward in time. In fact, it was destroyed hard enough to where the animator had to intervene and put the strip back together. Other fourth wall feats like manipulating the black space around cartoons and such would fall under the label of “fourth walk breaking feats” and not “strength feats” as there is no strength scaling that you can attribute to such parts of a cartoon. This is fine as a universal/universal+ feat however.

What About Popeye Boxing Himself?

This feat in particular has been chalked up to one of sheer toon force rather than anything related to speed. It’s been associated with the kind of toon feats where a character supposedly exists in two places at once physically. In most cases, they can be explained away with afterimages or duplication, and the same is done with Popeye boxing himself. With that said, the feat is a lot more viable than the feats that it’s compared to. Popeye is explicitly boxing himself in this scene and in the actual clip, it wasn’t just afterimages. He properly smacked himself while he moved into place despite being right across from his previous self (why is it so weird to word this). It should be fine as an inaccessible feat, especially when you compare it to arguably worse feats under the same umbrella.

Those Fucking Cosmologies That I Hate

Just to get an immediate disclaimer out of the way, neither SpongeBob or Popeye can be scaled to the peaks of their cosmologies for varying reasons. Just because their greater worlds are stacked in terms of timelines, alternate realities, etc., doesn’t naturally mean that they themselves can just scale to everything that exists. More detail will be given below but expect a lot of yap for the rest of this section.

The Basics

Starting with the most basic of basics, SpongeBob’s normal universe is essentially our universe in both size and other attributes. Whenever SpongeBob and co leave their ocean world, they are often greeted by human society and other creatures from our real world. Even when outer space is portrayed in SpongeBob, it generally follows the same structure as our own version… although certain episodes don’t mind taking liberties when needed. There is only one real problem with the simplest part of the cosmology as the comics oddly imply that the ocean itself could be its own universe and it has shown that there are stylized stars that reside high above the ocean. The comics supposedly had more input from Stephen Hillenburg than a lot of episodes did after the first movie (I could not find the tweets as the accounts are inaccessible at the moment so I’m trusting the SpongeBob wiki’s word on this) so it’s not completely unfounded. With that said, none of the three shows have ever portrayed the ocean as its own universe and while these details could be notable, they are undoubtedly very subtle details rather than in-your-face attributes that are a major part of the SpongeBob world. It’s very easy to not buy this given how much more often the ocean is just seen as, well, an ocean.

How Do We Deal With SpongeBob’s Continuity And Cosmology?

Now, moving onto how every piece of SpongeBob media ties into itself, things become very tricky. We not only have the main show itself but we also have to think about where the Patrick Star show, Kamp Koral, and the comics. Not only that but the show actively contradicts itself on purpose. There is blatantly no established canon within SpongeBob as the people behind the show have stated that SpongeBob episodes are created without any continuity in mind. Even when something from the past seems established, the team behind the show are very much willing to drastically change those aspects to focus on making an episode more fun. With that said, it doesn’t necessarily mean that nothing carries over between episodes. There are a lot of major attributes from the characters themselves, the roles they play, and Bikini Bottom as a whole that are still kept in mind when writing episodes. If something continuously reappears and keeps being a relevant part of the show, then it’s just safe to say that we should prioritize that aspect over other flimsy aspects.

For example, Kamp Koral and the Patrick Star show are consistently portrayed as prequels that predate the main series. Kamp Koral is obvious enough with past Sandy talking to her future self and the episode Kreepaway Kamp practically confirming that the show happened in the past, and the Patrick Star show implies that all of these main characters are much younger than their main show counterparts. This is evident in the fact that SpongeBob and Squidward have yet to get a job at the Krusty Krab and Patrick’s parents are much younger in Patrick’s show than when we see them in the main SpongeBob show. There has also been a debate on whether the Patrick Show is actually real given that official trailer descriptions have mentioned that Patrick’s variety show is imaginary and comes from the depths of his own brain. However, on a relook, there is a lot of confusion between the Patrick Show itself (the series) and the literal show that Patrick helms in-universe. Of course the in-universe show is imaginary as he is one of the main brains behind it but there isn’t really anything going against the Patrick show (the series) also being imaginary. Once again, we do see that Patrick’s parents (from the Patrick Show specifically) are literally real in the main SpongeBob series, plus nothing suggests that the other SpongeBob characters who appear in the show are just imaginary versions of themselves. Squidina would even allude to the time closet and house that Patrick had when he lived at during the Patrick Star show.

In any case, there is a bigger elephant in the room that we must address: are Kamp Koral and the Patrick Star show separate universes or have they actually been a part of SpongeBob’s main timeline this whole time? According to official promos for the Tidal Zone event, these three shows are meant to be considered separate realities that were created through the Big Bang, causing “Wumbo” photons to accelerate fast enough to the point of creating a nautical multiverse. The whole Tidal Zone event made a big deal in having these three shows crossover and it was even stated that those realities were “merging”. When you look at the actual special however, it’s anything but. The announcer is just flat out wrong in saying that they merged as what happens in the actual event is that a bunch of unrelated episodes occurred and their only connective tissue was that it was supposedly caused by the Tidal Zone. Grandpat’s journey through time would also string some of these episodes together but it doesn’t really help here. The only instance we see of these “realities” merging to begin with was when that same announcer fish was somehow affected by the robotization from an alternate universe. Granted, there are proper alternate universes sprinkled in this special event but all of this is to say that I don’t think these promos should be primary evidence for Kamp Koral/the Patrick Star show being alternate realities, universes or the like. The mainline show consistently references the events of Kamp Koral and the Patrick Star show as past events that occurred in those specific characters’ lifetime, including major characters like SpongeBob himself. The promos may also seem like they're consistent in alternate realities statements but generally speaking, the show should always take precedence over any social media videos or general advertising unless the former actually backs up any claims made in those promos. Given the stronger evidence in the show itself that goes against this idea, more skepticism should be met with assuming that every show is a separate reality from one another.

Tying into this idea, we also need to talk about the one Youtube video that people like to use to establish the SpongeBob cosmology. It’s often used to prove major ideas like “The Patrick Show has to be a parallel universe!”, “Squidward’s escapades with a time machine were responsible for creating the entire spacetime continuum”, and most importantly, “One SpongeBob universe actually has infinite universes within it due to the intersection of every timeline into this singular universe!”. It does seem like a lot of people assume that this is a concrete source of evidence given that it’s from the SpongeBob youtube channel. However, not only has this never been supported by the show itself but said video is written through the lens of a theorist that only knows as much as we do. He is simply spouting out all sorts of leaps in logic that have since been contradicted by the show itself. Granted, it’s not like the video is completely wrong in its logic but some of the things assumed are frankly absurd in hindsight. The guy assumes that Sandy is talking to an alt universe version of herself when there’s nothing concrete that suggests so besides claiming that interacting with the past should have unravelled spacetime and that it makes no sense for Sandy to grow up in 3D before then reverting back to 2D. Not only would the former be dispelled by claims from the official team themselves but the latter isn’t even weird given that a future episode would see that same young 3D Sandy interact with a 2D Plankton while also hinting that this is simply how her past self in that same timeline looked like. In fact, that entire Kamp Koral scene is rooted in the time travel idea so such a big jump in logic ultimately doesn’t work. I can point to plenty of other moments that are easily contradicted (moments like assuming a duplicate Patrick is actually an alt universe version because he has his own sentience, assuming that Patrick’s door is opening to other dimensions when it could just easily be opening to different locales across his universe, etc.) but either way, all of this falls apart when you try to apply that logic to SpongeBob’s scaling.

SpongeBob has infamously unraveled the universe and Patrick has his share of universal feats but when you seemingly apply this logic to their singular universe, they are suddenly affecting entire multiverses worth of universe. You can’t assume that destroying one universe in SpongeBob means you destroy all of them without any proper statement within said episode, it just becomes pure speculation by that point. It also contradicts with feats where one universe is destroyed but a parallel universe would stay unaffected, giving us evidence on the fact that you can destroy one universe without affecting everything. It’s much simpler to take feats like these at face value instead of trying to get greater results out of them through strange means. It is also just entirely logical to assume that the writers who wrote that feat into existence weren’t thinking about SpongeBob destroying the multiverse in that instead, they simply wanted to make SpongeBob do some bullshit to cap their short episode. None of this technically matters given that there is proper evidence for a wider SpongeBob cosmology but even still, a lot of misinformation has been spread on this part and it felt appropriate to try and clear this up.

Now For The ACTUAL Cosmology

Let’s make this quicker than the last section. We have the main universe but within that universe, multiple alternate timelines seem to be able to coexist. Disregarding the aforementioned Youtube video, we are not sure as to how many timelines there actually are. It’s likely finite in any instance but it’s worth noting that SpongeBob’s timelines could be functioning on the butterfly effect as we see that changing the past directly affects the present day. Granted this is not consistent outside of the episode but nonetheless it’s there.

Plenty of alternate universes/dimensions have also popped up across SpongeBob’s show.

  • Mirrors are consistently portrayed as having alternate dimension versions of whoever stands in front of them
  • Squidward has been taken to Nowhere, a seemingly endless white void where nothing exists, after his time machine had gone haywire
  • The Flying Dutchman has sent Squidward through what seems to be his own horrifying pocket dimension
  • SpongeBob and Patrick would be trapped in the Doodle Dimension, a place also devoid of anything minus whatever the duo are able to draw into existence
  • The many, MANY alternate universes that exist across games such as The Cosmic Shake as well the general what-if episodes of the main SpongeBob show
    • Comics such as Crisis of Infinite Jerks imply that there are an infinite number of alternate universes in the wider multiverse
  • As of the most recent movie, there could be a debatable layer of reality that exists above the SpongeBob universe. We see a SpongeBob-themed version of Paramount that looks over their entire world and can make whatever changes they want, but soon after forcing Sandy to be involved in the movie, SpongeBob and Flying Dutchman enter the room and cause chaos. While that Paramount sees the SpongeBob world as one they can manipulate, it may not necessarily mean they see it as fiction. There is also no implication that they don't just exist in the same world and can just affect events under the sea while staying above sea, much like how Pencils the Pirate is tackled.  

Above all of this is a proper higher dimension that transcends everything in SpongeBob, the plane where the Dreamy Dreamer resides. Well, it’s unclear if it would transcend the entire multiverse or only the singular universe that we see but we can be generous on this front. It’s a plane of existence that required SpongeBob to eat a special kind of jelly from a blue jellyfish to coexist on said plane. Everything in the Dreamy Dreamer’s dream embodies the entirety of SpongeBob’s universe, and while it mentioned that the Dreamer had the ability to merge the higher plane and SpongeBob’s universe into one, this never actually happened.

Now looking back at everything, it seems like SpongeBob’s multiverse is 5D in scope. Further arguments do exist but those can easily be addressed. Pencils the Pirate is the main writer of the SpongeBob comics but the comics completely contradict any argument that he transcends everything established. In fact, we see that he just exists in SpongeBob’s world above the ocean and SpongeBob and co can easily meet and interact with him like any other character. At best, Pencils can influence the current story that occurs below the sea but he is nowhere close to transcending SpongeBob’s world. There have also been mentions of the 8th and 9th dimensions across SpongeBob but it’s unclear if these are actually higher dimensions or if they even exist at all. The context behind said statements are kinda funky so it’s hard to put SpongeBob’s multiverse anywhere that high.

How Does SpongeBob Scale?

Simple, he doesn’t. No on-screen/on-panel feat of his really gets above universal and as established prior, it doesn’t really make sense to try and extrapolate these feats further. As for the Dreamy Dreamer, a scaling chain to him is practically nonexistent. SpongeBob only could wake him up entering his dream rather than trying to do so physically, plus we don’t even know if the merge would involve the entire multiverse or just that singular universe.

The best that SpongeBob can get is through Cosmic Jelly, a substance that is consistently stated to blow holes between universes and tears apart the fabric of space and time. Since the final boss weaponizes this Cosmic Jelly, SpongeBob should be able to scale right? Well, while this version of the Cosmic Jelly is strong, it is much more localized and weaponized than what the original Cosmic Jelly can actually do. It’s hard to say that he can scale to it in full physically, albeit an argument could be made for it. At best, cosmology scaling is undoubtedly getting SpongeBob up to Universal, maybe Universal+, even if you don’t buy the string feat.

Before anything else, I must thank Denim Valentine again for putting together a comprehensive page about Popeye’s cosmology. I can’t say that I necessarily agree with everything listed here but it really sped up the process on what would’ve been a massive headache.

The Basics

Just like SpongeBob’s world, Popeye’s world also resembles that of our own. It’s got an Earth, moons, stars, and all the like, although sometimes it chooses to take a more stylized form in some cases. These stylizations may seem like it shrinks the universe as a whole but Popeye’s writers surprisingly take the time to note down specific sizes for their celestial bodies and the distance between them. These sizes are practically identical to the ones in our universe so, with a few exceptions such as an eighth sea and demons that inhabit the center of the Earth, Popeye’s universe is one to one unless proven otherwise. Such a case is present when talking about the Source, a space composed of radiant energy that is located in the center of the universe. In Popeye’s world, this energy is meant to be the force that created everything animate and inanimate in his universe.

The Wider Cosmology

Alternate timelines can exist beyond the original timeline of Popeye’s world but whether they follow the butterfly effect or not is unclear as of now. Beyond his main universe, there lies a proper multiverse of all sorts of Popeye’s. You see, the mainline comic establishes that each and every licensed version of Popeye is actually a separate universe in of itself. Among those versions, the original comic strip universe can be grouped in with each and every cartoon that has been released since Popeye’s conception, totalling to a total of 6 universes that we see on-panel. Given that the series hasn’t been afraid to reference other Popeye media that isn’t pictured here however, you could likely group in media like the live-action movie, every other cartoon that is missing, comic specials, and all of the video games to give us a whopping total of 21 unique universes.

Oddly enough, certain universes see others as fictional media in their world, whether it’d be the cartoons depicting Popeye in comic form, the 1960s cartoon using the original comic strips as wallpaper, the Fleischer/Famous Studios version of Popeye accidentally ending up in the live-action Popeye movie, and the comic strip depicts Popeye as fictional through arcade games, shows, and even the Fleischer/Famous Studios cartoons of its universe. Of course, it’s not like those statements are concrete facts of Popeye’s world as they can often change between comic strips but it’s not like Popeye lacks a canon at all.

Existing besides the alternate universes, Popeye’s world also has dimensions and realms that encompasses their own space times. It’s got a mirror world where reflections can act on their own fruition and said world can even be entered with the right mirror. Pocket dimensions are often made by the witches of Popeye’s world and it’s implied that the afterlife is its own world that houses the dead. Whether this shares the same space as the stated hell is uncertain but nonetheless, that space is likely a place from where demons can be summoned on the fly. There also exist dimensions that house powerful entities such as Derleth the Destroyer, a consumer of realities, and the abstract embodiment of fate, a being who owns books that essentially dictate the rules of the universes such as fate, history, and timelines.

The Dreaded Dimensional Tiering

For as strange as it is, the comics love to delve into specific dimensional nonsense. Take Eugene the Jeep’s existence for example. He may be a three-dimensional being but he hails from the fourth dimension and his powers of teleportation and intangibility are based on slipping into said fourth dimension. It is generally treated as a proper higher dimension that exists above the main universe so it should be valid. There is also the Sea of Time, a temporal dimension where walking backwards results in you going backwards through time. It doesn’t just affect your age as it also alters the appearances of Popeye and Olive to that of how they originally looked in older comics. If this sea is meant to be the representation for time in Popeye’s world, then it COULD be another higher dimension. However, given that the Sea of Time acts as a bridge between the 3rd and 4th dimension, it is just as likely a space that exists between dimensions rather than being its own dimension… unless you want to say the Sea of Time is the real 4th dimension while the 4th dimension is actually the 5th dimension? Weird. The panels also provide more evidence for the 4th dimension being spatial but I digress.

Other dimensions have been hinted at before but we’ve yet to really see these dimensions in full. They’ve only been mentioned by name in unrelated comics and evidence that they are higher spatial dimensions is never given. A 7th dimension would be mentioned by the Sea Hag when she made Ogbert fight Popeye and Professor Wotasnozzle, a genius scientist, has gone on to mention that he’s sent people to the 8th dimension before. Neither gives the impression of a higher dimension but they do exist nonetheless. Above all of this is the real world where the actual people behind the cartoons interact with Popeye’s world while viewing said world as fictional. It is possible for there to be layers to this as Popeye has interacted with the artists of his comic who are then viewed as fictional by the live action people that were responsible for the creation of Popeye media. That’s not to mention interaction with groups like the Popeye fan club, a fan club that exists in the real world, the audience that watches Popeye as if he were fictional, and even a fictional version of Paramount that is responsible for creating his shorts but is still meant to exist above Popeye’s world. With all that said, this doesn’t make Popeye’s cosmology anywhere close to R>F, outerversal, or any of that bs but rather it just adds a strange amount of layers to Popeye’s world. If none of this makes sense then don’t worry, it doesn’t make sense to us either.

All in all, this would generally put Popeye’s cosmology around 4D-5D, potentially with a few extra layers.

How Does Popeye Scale?

For as big as his cosmology is, there isn’t really any feasible way to scale Popeye to the highest points of his cosmology. The best argument that’s been made before is that he could beat up a monster from the 7th dimension but, in my humble opinion, beating up someone that comes from blank dimension doesn’t automatically mean that Popeye can destroy said dimension. You would need far more evidence for such claims and given the standards set for SpongeBob, it’d be hard to say that Popeye’s feat of surviving the universe being turned off means he survived his entire cosmology being turned off. A better argument can at least be made for Popeye but it would be pretty reasonable to not scale Popeye that high.

Since Popeye was partially responsible for tearing his film strip apart, which as mentioned prior should be valid for universal/universal+ scaling, that would be the highest that you could get him physically. You could maybe argue that the universe being turned off is not only an AP feat but that it could get to 4D because the big guy and Popeye were in said fourth dimension when the feat occurred; it’d be a bit difficult to argue for it as an AP feat but either way, you’re not physically scaling Popeye to the cosmology. At the very least, Popeye’s relish of the gods can technically let him reach the 4th dimension so hooray.

Where Is The Layered Hax?

Keen readers may have noticed that there was a lack of mention in the fact that SpongeBob’s magic pencil could seemingly negate his ability to regenerate. I mean, it makes enough sense right? Doodlebob erased a portion of SpongeBob with the magic pencil and SpongeBob would need to rely on the pencil to draw himself back into existence despite the fact that he can commonly regenerate his body in those early seasons. However, this topic does tie into the issue I mentioned prior.

The SpongeBob series as a whole not only treats proper canon as a joke but the writers have been willing to contradict established aspects of the series for the sake of some laughs. The argument that is usually made for the pencil is that it can negate low-godly regeneration because SpongeBob couldn’t come back from the eraser despite having "X" episode where he could restore his body from nothing. It’s treating SpongeBob’s highest level of regeneration as a consistent aspect of his character but after looking through the entire series, this idea feels a bit misguided. You would still give SpongeBob the highest level of regeneration for the sake of a debate but the series doesn’t see it the same way. As the most notable evidence for this, SpongeBob characters have the capability to regenerate from great amounts of damage instantly in some episodes but in others, they have to go to the hospital for their injuries and are practically unable to regenerate in those instances. Hell, SpongeBob himself has been left in situations like this. You can’t assume that SpongeBob would maintain the same level of regeneration across every episode because the writers are writing each episode as if they’re in their own bubble (unless specified otherwise).

If SpongeBob was erased by the magic pencil in that episode and literally said that he couldn’t regenerate, then it would be much clearer evidence for regen negation. However, there is no implication that he couldn’t regenerate, let alone the idea that SpongeBob was at his peak regenerative ability in that episode. We never even see him regenerate in this episode so what is to say that the intent is for him to be at his regenerative peak through the whole episode? The only evidence that can really counter this is the fact that erasers are seen as a consistent threat outside of episodes with the magic pencil. As seen in Squidness Protection, a criminal that goes by Elmer Eraser can threaten characters with his eraser hand, threatening to “rub them out” if they tell on him. Being rubbed out is a consistent worry between both episodes, especially in the latter episode as being rubbed out is such a big deal that Squidward needed to go into witness protection to avoid said criminal. We even see Squidward rub SpongeBob out at the end of Squidness Protection, reducing him to nothing but legs. If erasers are taken as an actual threat between two episodes, then surely that can justify regen negation? Looking at these scenes closely, we don’t see SpongeBob regenerate from this erasure but this doesn’t necessarily mean that it negated regen either. We legitimately don’t know what happened after SpongeBob was rubbed out as the episode ended before we could see it; we know that he comes back eventually but due to the show’s episodic nature, we can’t say that the episode that follows is a continuation of those events. Regeneration is present in this episode but it’s not brought to light at any point, nor is it relevant to where characters are claiming that they can’t regenerate after being erased. Being erased is very much threatening and should count as existence erasure but nothing is implying that their regen is being negated too. It ultimately falls into the same pitfalls as the other episode.

Even putting aside all this, if you want to give SpongeBob such a high level of regen negation (or any regen negation to begin with), then you can do the same for Popeye. When Popeye has eaten spinach, he’s been able to properly injure Brutus and send him to the hospital despite the fact that Brutus has previously shown the ability to regenerate his entire skeleton within that same series. A spinach-powered Brutus could also negate Popeye's own regenerative ability, leaving him injured and bruised. Granted, it wouldn’t be as impressive as SpongeBob’s but the comparison is there and realistically neither should get layered regen negation. There is no official word on if elements from the Popeye cartoon stays consistent across their respective series but given its episodic nature, the writers were more likely to not have kept that in mind when they had Popeye punch Brutus to the hospital.

Popeye’s also got a case of layered hax that falls under the same issues. It usually boils down to Popeye resisting one hax in one short in his base form but then he is affected by said hax in a different short. Once he takes his spinach, he negates that hax entirely, making it seem like Popeye’s spinach power can generally negate layered hax. The issue is that, as mentioned prior, Popeye is mainly episodic and doesn’t really have any canon elements that carry over between different shorts. Unlike SpongeBob’s series, Popeye doesn’t disregard canon altogether but it’s still being made with the intent of being episodic. A lot of hax would be layered with spinach if we considered it to be viable but we’ll only consider it to have “layered” properties if the evidence is found within the same short. Otherwise, layered hax for either is a no-go.

Potential

(art by _Yu_Narukami)

On the surface, this matchup may seem surprisingly simple by nature. If we are going to be completely honest, it is. However, this should not be a detriment against the matchup.

The simplicity of pitting two iconic nautical-themed cartoon characters against each other (yes, Popeye is nautical themed, he is a sailor at heart and you can’t take that away from him!) is all you really need to make it a fun matchup, but regardless of that, they do also have some pretty good comparisons you can make. Iconic laughs, iconic associations with foods like Krabby Patties and spinach respectively, and a drive to fight for everything and everyone they love against all odds. It may not have the flashiest themes or a great number of connections but going simple for either is perfectly fine to be honest. By all means, it ties into their love for adventure, how dedicated they are to the things and people they love, and the matchup can hone in on them growing past their faults to become true ocean warriors. Along with all this, there are even some fun contrasts like SpongeBob’s lack of strength (usually) vs Popeye’s innate super strength, the unhealthy vs healthy rivalry that is going on with their major foods, and the general above sea vs below sea contrast. That isn’t even mentioning the numerous times where SpongeBob has referenced Popeye or the fact of Tom Kenny voicing Popeye in the now cancelled Popeye movie, making this matchup feel all the more natural. Also, based asexual and nonbinary reps respectively.

Granted, a large portion of its appeal to most would be the fact that these are broken toon-force using characters of their world, often breaking any and all logic while infamously being hard to put down. While this isn’t necessarily wrong, having this as a major selling point is a bit lame. Toon force matchups as a whole try too hard to have their silliness be a major appeal and that feels especially prominent with SpongeBob vs Popeye. Rather, I think the emphasis on reality-breaking abilities can tie better into their fight dynamic. SpongeBob can and has been written as someone who likes to engage in fisticuffs before he goes for his crazier stuff. He isn’t just some zany toon force god that will immediately warp reality to his whims, he tends to fight at a more grounded level before he resorts to crazier stuff. Popeye doesn’t need to fight someone who is mainly a brawler when it’s more interesting for him to fight a new type of opponent rather than the same kind of brawlers that he’s been fighting against his whole career. It doesn’t really matter if said opponent has abilities tied to their brawling because we’ve seen it before regardless. Instead, Popeye’s faced with a unique challenge that forces him to do more than just punch his way out. SpongeBob would also need to fight a competent brawler who can fend himself off against a lot of SpongeBob’s tricks. You can have an honest-to-god fight dynamic where Popeye can easily bounce off of SpongeBob’s wild abilities with his own while SpongeBob’s own brawling ability can easily clash well with Popeye’s own.

It may also seem strange to try and clash Popeye’s personality with SpongeBob given how much they contrast but I think that could actually make for some fun banter. I think it’d be reasonable to have the set up revolve around a misunderstanding with, say, a Krabby Patty order that was purposefully planned out and executed by Plankton. As the fight goes on, SpongeBob’s bubbly and joyful personality can mesh with the gruff sailor talk that Popeye likes to use during fights. Popeye just loves to punch but he’ll realize that simply brute forcing his way out of this fight won’t be the best strategy here. You can have a lot of fun interactions that relate to each other’s absurdness and if you want to tie in a sort of mini story arc during the fight, SpongeBob can be inspired by Popeye’s manliness while Popeye takes interest in SpongeBob’s dedication to the Krusty Krab. While neither are blood-thristy by any means, the two can just have a fun brawl with the other that can then quickly escape into the more absurd side of things. SpongeBob can try to use his karate to deal with Popeye but Popeye’s greater skill can force him to delve into his more absurd abilities mid-battle. At the same time, Popeye is doing everything in his power to put the sponge down but since his basic abilities won’t work, he’ll also need to dive into more absurdity to keep up. It’ll be a fun time overall and, in my opinion, I think it works to each other’s strengths better than other matchups could.

You can have SpongeBob turn into the moon as he tries to crash into Popeye, only for Popeye to punch him back, but then another SpongeBob pops up and a game of volleyball can occur between the two. Popeye can put the pressure on SpongeBob before he then self-destructs to get Popeye off of him, teleporting elsewhere to try and get the jump on him. A twist can be had on SpongeBob absorbing the ocean as he can try spraying Popeye with all the absorbed water, but Popeye not only pushes back against all the water but he manages to tie the water up in a knot which causes SpongeBob to explode. If Popeye ends up being engulfed in a nuclear explosion, you can have him absorb the entire thing, and in general, you can have some fun with SpongeBob desperately trying to get the spinach away from Popeye before it comedically ends up in Popeye’s hands regardless. It’s inherently hard to dislike this matchup unless you just dislike the characters and shows themselves because this matchup can be so much fun in general.

Oh yeah, and music-wise, it’ll be an obvious banger. You’re meshing SpongeBob’s best tunes with Popeye’s classic tunes, and if bangers like Balderdash and Ocean Men (not to be mistaken with Ween’s hit Ocean Man) are anything to go by, the track would be a hell of a trip. Overall the matchup is such a fun time and it not having the flashiest parallels or the negative stigma around toon matchups/episode doesn’t take away from it being a banger.

Verdict


Alright you land lubbers, it’s time for us to find out if a winner will truly submerge from the depths of this blog!

To start us off, we need to have an interesting discussion on stats between these two. In order to cover all of our bases, the discussion will be divided into three separate segments: the lowest of the lows, the middest of the mid, and the highest of the highs.

Before we need to look at exact numbers, it’s worth considering the consistency in which SpongeBob’s and Popeye’s strength are portrayed across their entire history as cartoons. The basic assumption that people would have about the strength comparison is that SpongeBob can occasionally have higher showcases but he is generally portrayed as extremely weak physically, often to a very comical degree. When you directly compare his usual strength to Popeye’s, the difference becomes as clear as day and night. He doesn’t need spinach to perform consistent supernatural feats at his base level of power, feats that surpass the sponge visually. Granted, the debate is relying on the two at their highest strength so this perspective won’t be the most important for this verdict, but it’s worth mentioning for the sole fact that this idea alone would convince a lot of people that Popeye is consistently portrayed as superhuman while SpongeBob… tries his best.

Putting aside common portrayals, let’s actually dive into the specifics. SpongeBob does have a lot of strength feats that go beyond his inability to lift teddy bears or sticks, whether it’d be pushing structures around, surviving plenty of nuclear explosions, or consistently matching other Bikini Bottom residents in combat. Without delving into his highest feats, SpongeBob has a lot of consistent feats that get him around planet to star level, whether that’d be him replacing the moon, him destroying the moon with a jack-in-the-box, taking the full force of the ocean exploding on top of him, surviving a collision that caused a planet to be destroyed, turning the sun into a bubble, etc. Scaling to Patrick furthers back this up with him being able to fling Saturn away, survive the Earth blowing up next to him, and more. Popeye’s also got a high number of feats that get him around those planet to star ranges as well. He’s fought planet destroyers, caused massive damage to Saturn, tilted the Earth by punching Brutus into it, gave the sun a black eye, and occasionally shattered the sun with and without spinach. You could potentially scale him a bit higher if you believe that Popeye was smacked by an actual living constellation but that’s left unclear. Even assuming that that’s the case, the fact that SpongeBob’s able to create galaxies inside the Krusty Krab could signify that he can reach that level of power fairly easily. Speed wise, SpongeBob is casually reaching Mach speeds when travelling and he would at bare minimum be a lightning-timer/laser-timer in reaction speed. Of course, this would be massively outclassed by his friends’ own FTL/MFTL speed feats that are then dwarfed by SpongeBob’s own string unraveling feat which gets to a whopping 1.18 Quivignitillion x FTL. On Popeye’s end, he’s got a lot more feats of him travelling at high mach and relativistic speeds, with his spinach power blatantly boosting him to FTL speeds on the low end. Of course, he can and has easily outdone his best speed by a long shot. Popeye’s own combat speed allows him to punch and throw targets to completely different celestial bodies altogether, whether it’d be him chucking aliens to Mars or chucking rocks/trees at the sun within seconds. Out of all his finite speed feats, the most impressive of the bunch would have to be when he pulled down a pipe that reached from Earth to Neptune, getting to around 3,002.08 x FTL at its highest.

These are just finite ends however as there is a true peak to their stats. In SpongeBob’s case, universal has been argued for his general AP and durability given the string feat and scaling to Patrick’s own cartoon-ripping and universe-destroying escapades. With items like his magic bubbles, SpongeBob has the capability to rip holes between universes, granting it universal+ levels of destruction (and maybe potential physical scaling to the bubbles if you’re generous). With Popeye, there are avenues to universal - universal+ levels of power such as him ripping his film strip or assuming that Popeye upscales a monster that could supposedly consume realities (the latter is shaky but it is there). If you really wanted to, you could not interpret Popeye surviving the big guy’s erasure of the universe as being resistance-based but rather durability-based, further adding evidence to the pile. We don’t buy it as being durability-based but even then, Popeye is unaffected by a universe-wide erasure which is notable in its own right.  As for speed, you can get both to inaccessible if you’re lenient on their highest ends. SpongeBob has his feat of flipping a Krabby Patty into another reality or scaling to Patrick running to the future/seahorses that can fling you through time given enough generosity. On Popeye’s end, the simple act of him boxing himself and hitting himself while occupying two places at once also gets him to those non-finite speeds.

Comparing their stats on a finite level, SpongeBob seems to take it for the most part. Both he and Popeye may match planet and star level ends but through the creation of entire galaxies, it can even dwarf Popeye’s debatable constellation scaling. He is also just… MASSIVELY faster than Popeye could ever be finitely. Popeye being thousands of times faster than light is undoubtedly impressive but when you directly clash it against SpongeBob’s absurd speeds... yeah. You have a gap of 10 to the 75th power. Luckily, we also have to compare their non-finite feats, in which case they’d both be dead even across the stat trio. This is obviously assuming equal leniency but ultimately, neither are gonna surpass each other stat wise. Even when we give both the stat boosts found in their own arsenals and abilities, they would both just be unquantifiably stronger than their highest shown feats.

No matter how you paint this picture, SpongeBob and Popeye should reasonably tie in stats. Due to this, we will need to focus our eyes elsewhere to determine a winner.

If strength and speed won’t do either in, then surely their will to fight will be their downfall! After all, these two are men who will push beyond their physical limits to do the impossible and prove to themselves that they are in fact iron-willed men. To stay a resilient threat in battle, you must have the experience to keep up with your enemy, the readiness to access a useful arsenal at all times, and the endurance to fight until your last breath. Let’s start with none of those and instead talk about their regeneration!

It’s practically impossible to put either down with basic strength alone; even if one of them had a massive edge in strength, both SpongeBob and Popeye will always come back from any sort of physical damage. Even if their entire bodies were to be erased into nothing, they can instantly regenerate themselves good as new. It is worth mentioning that Popeye needs to rely on his spinach to come back from physical erasure while SpongeBob’s is all natural but given the fact that he’s always got a spinach can on him or that a spinach can will come to him in times of need, this shouldn’t be too much of an issue. We’re getting ahead of ourselves though as we also need to discuss what happens after both lose their bodies. SpongeBob would seemingly become a ghost after his body becomes nothing while Popeye’s consciousness continues to persist even when his body can’t. Since they both have the capability to interact with non-physical beings, wouldn’t this mean that they can physically harm those forms too? SpongeBob’s ghost has the capability to regenerate his ghostly body and dying as a ghost will just bring him back to life while Popeye’s consciousness doesn’t have that same luxury. Because of this, it seems like SpongeBob could just beat it up until it’s destroyed but that brings up another issue. Given that Popeye’s consciousness is directly connected to the Source, SpongeBob can’t permanently destroy it as long as it stays connected to the energy at the center of the universe. Granted, he should have the capability to interact with and destroy said energy but the issue is that SpongeBob has to learn about its location first before he could go after it. It’s also assuming that Popeye would just stand there and let him find it rather than continue putting the pressure on SpongeBob but it’s not an impossible task by any means (this will be further elaborated in the last category). This isn’t even mentioning the fact that other forces can simply redraw both SpongeBob and Popeye back into existence if they are truly wiped away. Granted, it’s not a game-changer as both forces not only have similar capabilities but SpongeBob or Popeye can exit their media to deal with these forces. Even if they do though, Pencils the Pirate is a regular human while that Popeye double is still a Popeye in the flesh, making it much easier for Popeye to deal with SpongeBob’s force rather than vice versa. No matter how you slice the cake, these two will have trouble dealing physical damage to either.

Pushing aside regeneration, SpongeBob’s sponge-like body would simply be resistant to Popeye’s normal physical blows while Popeye’s own superhumanly durable body would see him laughing off SpongeBob’s basic attacks. Any projectiles that are thrown at one another can casually be reflected back and they both generally have some crazy showcases of endurance. They both can continue operating over days, weeks, and even years worth of time without needing as much as a break. Numerically speaking, SpongeBob has the better endurance in how he could watch 37 years worth of Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy in one go; however, both have ways to instantly restore their stamina. Again, SpongeBob’s is natural while Popeye’s relies on eating spinach but the fact that Popeye’s energy pool is tied to tens of thousands of source beings essentially gives him a near-infinite pool of energy to pull from. It would prove to be very difficult for either to run out of energy before either can go for the kill. However, you may be wondering to yourself: why can’t SpongeBob just prevent Popeye from getting his spinach? It’s not like Popeye is guaranteed to eat his spinach in time, his cans have been intercepted in the past by less competent characters so surely someone like SpongeBob could stop spinach from getting into Popeye’s mouth.

This is where we must talk about how accessible their arsenals are at all times. We established it in the Before We Begin section but to restate it, both SpongeBob and Popeye can pull any item that they need at any time. Nothing is ever truly out of their reach as long as they’ve used it in the past and are willing to pull said object out whenever they wish. In relation to Popeye’s spinach cans, he always carries a few cans on him but there is also the fact that Popeye has multiple unique and consistent ways to bring spinach to him if it’s ever needed. Even if SpongeBob tried to eliminate every spinach can within the area, Popeye’s sheer luck, his ability to create spinach out of nothing, or the literal audience throwing him a can of spinach will ensure that he always gets his spinach. Wiping out spinach on a universal level with, say, SpongeBob’s magic page wouldn’t work either due to the audience existing outside of said universe + the potential narrative armor that surrounds Popeye and his love for spinach.

Popeye’s also got the fighting experience to ward off SpongeBob as he’s fought against the majority of SpongeBob’s abilities prior. If the Bob brings out something that Popeye’s yet to see, then he can easily adapt to said attack and counter with his own bullshit. That isn’t to say that SpongeBob can’t do the same however as he also has just as quick of an adaptation rate. Popeye also has never fought someone as unpredictable as SpongeBob as while he has sometimes been defeated by more competent opponents, SpongeBob can always somehow get the upper hand on the majority of enemies that he’s faced. Either way, Popeye is obviously better at hand-to-hand combat than SpongeBob has ever showcased which in of itself is a detriment with how SpongeBob likes to start off with physical fisticuffs before falling back onto his crazier abilities. Spinach will further enhance Popeye’s own skills on top of what he’s already accomplished and generally speaking, Popeye is more competent overall. SpongeBob’s had his moments of genius but he can also just as easily be a naive manchild that runs away from danger. Meanwhile, Popeye’s kept a cool head and always thinks ahead in the face of danger, sometimes to a very stubborn degree.

Having said all that, Popeye’s fighting skill will aid him in the long run but determining a winner in this category is still difficult. That skill won’t be entirely useful when your opponent can fight for as long as you, has an easily accessible arsenal, outskills you in other areas, and said opponent is just as unkillable as you are. In order for either to win, they not only need to rely on their skill to win but they need actual wincons that can put the other down for good. For now, we will say that these two tie in their resilience but we’ll get back to this.

(In the French Narrator voice) Ah, the wincons category. Surely nothing bad ever happens here.

For there to be any chance of us determining a winner, we need to look at the nonsensical abilities that these two have demonstrated. A lot of overlap already exists between their powers, surprisingly. Rather than breeze over what and what isn’t shared between the two, let’s really go all in on every power they have access to and if they can counter one another. There is a lot to go over so buckle your snail down and hold onto your sailor hats, we’re going into deep waters.

Mobility: Both SpongeBob and Popeye will never run out of mobility options. Whether it’s crossing massive distances with their own speed, natural flight, natural teleportation, or even taking advantage of screen transitions to instantly appear elsewhere, they’re pretty even for the most part. Smaller advantages do exist on either side, whether it is SpongeBob’s ability to teleport objects onto Popeye or Popeye’s magic that can force SpongeBob to be teleported at his location but neither attribute is particularly noteworthy. The fact that Popeye’s punches could send SpongeBob to hell could be worth mentioning if SpongeBob couldn’t just easily open portals with his imagination. SpongeBob’s slide whistle could also make him too slippery to hit but it’s reliant on SpongeBob’s ability to use it, meaning that Popeye only has to break it to stop its usage.

Vehicles are also pretty comparable for the most part. They’ve got vehicles for the land, air, and sea, although Popeye’s yellow submarine is pretty interesting for the debate. SpongeBob can’t technically access a higher dimension without outside help so Popeye could go to the 4th dimension to end the battle. That wouldn’t be very in-character for Popeye but the option does exist I guess.

Imagination: Believe it or not, both SpongeBob and Popeye have access to imaginations that let them do anything they want really. Popeye’s certainly had some fun with it and it’s gotten him out of tight situations in the past. Directly comparing these two in imaginations does give us a clear winner though. Not only is SpongeBob far more experienced in using his imagination powers but the things he’s accomplished with it are far, far more absurd than what Popeye’s ever been able to do. Popeye’s never done as much as imagine people in scenarios that would harm them or force them to see their visions. Hell, if Popeye were to try and create with his imagination during a fight, SpongeBob can just straight up negate it by making it hear boring words like taxes or homework. There is only one king of imagination and SpongeBob would take it in spades. That’s just imagination powers as a whole however as we must also talk about…

Creation Powers: SpongeBob and Popeye can just create anything with a simple wave of their hand or no gesture whatsoever. It would genuinely be more useful for Popeye as he can always make spinach cans from nothing if he runs out but they both can just create anything that they need for battle… well, at least anything that they would think of. Their ability to create life is also pretty comparable so not much to say there.

Even considering the magic pencil that lets SpongeBob draw anything into existence, Popeye’s got a magic pencil that can draw on its own as well as a giant pen that has a similar function.

Mind-Bending Powers: While they both do have a wide array of mind-related powers, it would be hard to determine if there is a clear victor here. Popeye’s got hypnosis magic but SpongeBob can have hypnotism used through Hans; they both would resist its effects naturally, although if you’re mean enough to SpongeBob then you can say that it’s not a consistent enough resistance to count. Items like SpongeBob’s mind-controlling staff and his grandma sweater would also either fail to work on Popeye or they can just not work on him (in relation to the former). SpongeBob could maybe drive Popeye mad enough to where he is stuck in a time loop of his greatest fear but that would be hard to accomplish when Popeye’s resisted those exact effects. The fight would also have to last long enough to reach that point, by which point Popeye would just reach his enraged state before he could ever go mad.

In relation to dream powers, SpongeBob does have the slight edge here. Popeye can invade your dreams if he’s nearby but SpongeBob can explicitly project his consciousness out of his dream and freely enter other dreams. Not only does SpongeBob have full control over your dreams but he can dispel them entirely, cancelling out something as useful as Popeye’s dream-based precognition. Being able to damage the dream selves of his target would also be helpful since it lets SpongeBob transfer damage to the target in the real world but Popeye can actually resist such phenomena and send it flying back towards SpongeBob so it’s a bit moot in that regard.

Morality/Emotional Shifting: On a related note, both can forcibly warp your sense of morality through Krabby Patties/SpongeBob’s DNA and spinach-powered punches respectively. While it’s an impressive ability to have, both SpongeBob and Popeye have shown to be completely resistant to having their state of mind forcibly warped. SpongeBob’s resisted Jerktonium due to his pure heart while Popeye has casually resisted such effects with and without spinach.

Enhanced Senses: Both have exceptional sight, a great sense of smell, a direct connection to your thoughts, and they also have other strange sixth senses that go off when needed. This is where the comparison really ends though as SpongeBob lacks the numerous ways in which Popeye can sense danger. The closest thing to such a sense is SpongeBob being able to sense an argument about him from a completely different time period, but Popeye’s not only got that but also the ability to detect evil specifically and have his fist take him to said danger. Maybe SpongeBob’s ability to clean at the subatomic level could be applied to his senses and thus gives him more awareness in general, but either way, Popeye’s senses are far more versatile and helpful here.

Shapeshifting: Generally speaking, their shapeshifting capabilities are practically limitless. SpongeBob’s used it to make himself buffer, create tools, dodge attacks, and deceive others by turning into the items that they want to use. Popeye’s used it to make all sorts of weapons, tools, and explosives, along with improving his own mobility or stonewalling any danger head-on. Shapeshifting also grants them both a transmutation resistance by default, so there isn’t exactly a superior shapeshifter here. Eating Popeye’s spinach or Popeye’s own spinach-powered punches can prevent enemies from shapeshifting but the former is unlikely to occur while the latter does require physical contact.

Size Shifting: Both can shrink and grow at will but once again, SpongeBob’s power is more natural while Popeye needs spinach. Despite this, Popeye has found greater uses out of his size-shifting abilities. He can force you to shrink with his punches but he can also do so with no physical contact, plus he can apply whatever size he wants onto his weapons. A hard enough punch from Popeye can also forcefully disassemble targets into multiple smaller versions of themselves, albeit SpongeBob can just easily put himself back together in that state. Kelp Grow can also let SpongeBob greatly increase the size of anything he sprays but he’s never used it in combat. It’s probably safer to say that Popeye takes this.

Elemental Powers: Nothing major here. They can both use the heat and cold but they both resist it (to a degree for heat in SpongeBob’s case). SpongeBob’s ability to make anything with sand is fairly useful but it doesn’t give him a new advantage due to his pre-established imagination. Likewise, manipulating the ocean could be somewhat useful if Popeye is fighting SpongeBob on his own turf but it’s still not a gamechanger.

Duplication: Popeye’s duplicated himself a few times over but SpongeBob has duplicated himself a million times over. Even if Popeye has fought hordes of enemies before, he’s never fought that number of enemies at once. He may not be completely screwed since he can nullify clones with his spinach power but SpongeBob would still have a huge numbers advantage overall.

Fourth Wall Powers: With the greater awareness of their medium, it won’t be the most relevant ability here but it does play some interesting roles here. Both can use screen transitions to teleport so that is instantly ruled out, and they both can easily leave and enter any medium that they come across. Whether it’s in-verse media or their cartoon worlds, it’s not like either are superior in that regard but then you have to look at the greater picture. While they can both get their enemies stuck in fictional media, only Popeye can negate immersion altogether by trapping SpongeBob in his current medium. It is entirely possible for SpongeBob to teleport past this barricade given what we’ve seen in Friendaversary but the fact that Popeye can negate the ability at all is noteworthy. Immersion also just grants Popeye more access to spinach and even lets his “real” self assist his current self so that’s another advantage.

Broadway Force: SpongeBob and Popeye do in fact have broadway force. Neither have a resistance to it but it’s not like either are making the other dance to death.

Explosions: Flexing hard enough to blow up a whale from the inside is impressive on Popeye’s end. However, SpongeBob not only has plenty more showcases but his explosions are arguably more useful. Sugar squeeze lets him spit out fireworks, he himself can turn into a fireworks display, he can collide into guys hard enough to blow them up into nothing, and he can just send characters flying hard enough to make them explode into confetti. Add on his potential attacks that can cause nuclear explosions as well as his own self-destruction, the latter of which could get Popeye off of him while letting him regenerate elsewhere, and SpongeBob has way better expertise in this area. The only other upperhand that Popeye has is that his spinach cans can absorb point-blank nuclear explosions but given that SpongeBob has more than one type of explosion, it’s not completely useful here.

Super Screams: To put it simply, it’s even. The physical feats they accomplish with their yelling are somewhat on the same level.

Invisibility: SpongeBob’s got the invisible spray that turns anything sprayed invisible (including himself) while Popeye’s got the headache pill. However, Popeye can also access natural invisibility with his spinach. Going invisible won’t really matter for the debate when they both have experience with invisible objects/beings and their enhanced senses would clue them in on each other.

Telekinesis/Restoration: These powers are accessible to SpongeBob via the trident while Popeye can access telekinetic magic through spinach and can restore anything through… his awesome strength I guess! Both are as effective as each other but Popeye does have the slight advantage in being able to use those powers under spinach, a commonly used powerup of his. Meanwhile, SpongeBob has to rely on a trident that doesn’t even belong to him + a lack of knowhow on how to use the trident effectively.

Time Travel: Both can debatably time travel through natural means but they also have access to time machines that can take them anywhere in time and space. Popeye can just punch you to a different time period while time travel has been used by SpongeBob to summon multiple versions of himself but since they’re both acausal either way, their time travel cancels out for the most part.

Breaking Their Worlds: Reality simply cannot handle these two when they very casually shatter the logic behind their world. Are either superior in this category though? Well, breaking space is a very casual feat on both ends so that’s equalized. SpongeBob has more instances of breaking gravity specifically but Popeye breaks physics altogether. They can both manipulate matter through merging and changing their molecular structure altogether but SpongeBob is the only one with an actual resistance to it. When Popeye was split into atoms for example, he couldn’t do anything until his spinach was fed to him. It’s unclear if SpongeBob could replicate that same effect but the possibility of that occurring gives SpongeBob the slight advantage (Popeye’s merging with a nuke to turn into a robot is cooler though!). As for breaking time, Popeye should generally take it. Ignoring time travel, SpongeBob does have time stopping and one of his powerups can slow down time. However, Popeye’s consciousness can debatably resist time manipulation effects despite being unable to move during those moments. Having awareness of those powers can still grant Popeye insight into the abilities and counter in ways that would outsmart the time manipulation. He also has better time-breaking abilities as a whole, whether that is breaking the time barrier with spinach-powered speed, his own time stop, skipping through time by using his fourth wall abilities, or just punching people hard enough to send them through time.

Speaking more broadly, Popeye also actually uses all of these abilities in combat. SpongeBob’s never resorted to most of these powers during a proper brawl; for example, SpongeBob only used his time stop in the Nicktoons Unite game to let out a quip instead of dodging the incoming goo. Matter manip and gravity manip are mainly used for sillier moments, and space manip is generally the same minus the holes he kicks around to try and trap a rogue urchin. Popeye is out here using a lot of these abilities at their fullest while SpongeBob never gets the chance to do so.

Stat Boost and Powerups: As if they weren’t strong enough as is, their strength and speed can be further boosted by numerous means. SpongeBob’s power of friendship already lets him jump up to an absurd level of strength but he’s also got the magic book to buff himself and numerous powerups that can stack on top of that. He’s even got numerous powerups that temporarily make him immune to damage. Popeye doesn’t slack on this category either though as he’s got his own invulnerability item and, more relevantly, spinach to dramatically increase his strength by just as an absurd amount. Even without it, his enraged form accomplishes the same thing without needing to fall back on spinach. Where this gets interesting is when you look back at how Popeye’s source energy works as he can consistently pull from energy from tens of thousands source beings, multiply those sources when enraged, and ramp up the intensity of each energy to keep growing and growing in strength. It’s hard to honestly compare their stat increases when there are no numbers attached to them but Popeye’s case generally comes off as way more impressive.

While we’re on the topic of powerups, let’s also get all of those out of the way. The Flying Dutchman’s treasures prevent possession (not that important because Popeye has no possession abilities), a powerup that is electricity with AOE (which Popeye would resist), and other powerups can slightly heal SpongeBob and give him a bit of defense. The most notable powerups here would have to be the time slows that Popeye neither resists or can counter with his own. As mentioned prior however, Popeye would likely keep the same level of awareness despite being forced to move at a slower rate, and with spinach power, Popeye could potentially accelerate himself enough to break the time barrier altogether which could negate the time slow’s effect. Granted, he’s never tried such a thing but it is an option. Even then, he’s got fewer powerups but they are also just as useful as time slows. Reversing SpongeBob’s movements, swapping positions and items, and utilizing an effect shield to dispel status effects are all pretty damn useful against SpongeBob’s array of powerups, if not brought down by how Popeye needs to grab these powerups himself. You could go either way in determining a victory for this category.

Other Unorthodox Powers: There are a bunch of unique powers that we’ve yet to cover so let’s just rapid-fire through each one and explain why they’re not major debate changers. SpongeBob’s shadow puppets can be punched by Popeye due to his ability to interact with mirages, bubbles are very versatile in SpongeBob’s hands but Popeye’s prowess in combat and shapeshifting abilities lets him deal with the onslaught, and magic bubble soap is… interesting. We’ll get back to that. Meanwhile on Popeye’s end, body swapping is very situational, energy absorption is about as useful as SpongeBob’s own absorption, and clairvoyance may not work on SpongeBob due to Bubbles’ blessing. Age regression likely wouldn’t matter when SpongeBob can change age at will either.

Each and every one of the powers mentioned above are not gonna make or break for either. They are not only clashing numerous similar abilities against each other but a lot of those abilities are ultimately resisted or they just fail to put the other down for good. It doesn’t make these advantages moot but for a proper wincon, there are specific abilities that we need to look into. Let’s start off with the core issue in finding a winner. SpongeBob can survive as a ghost, continue to regenerate even as a ghost, and double dying will just immediately let him come back to life. Popeye can come back from nothing with spinach but his consciousness persists as long as the Source remains active in the center of the universe; you also have to tie in the fact that Popeye can always project his soul out of his body and that he could debatably live on without his soul. What we need to focus on is a consistent ability that could eliminate them in their entirety, and if not eliminate, then permanently incapacitate them.

If either are gonna land that wincon in the first place, then we need to talk about the immense amount of luck that these two passively emit. It doesn’t completely protect them from harm but in the most dire of situations, it’ll always be there to get them back on their feet so that they can win their battles. SpongeBob’s luck has actively redirected potential damage onto others, it has the capability to make enemies defeat themselves, and he can casually avoid harm altogether. If he’s ever defeated, a series of events can occur to where he’ll be brought back to life such as when he and Patrick were brought back from dehydration in Shell City. The lucky tie clip guarantees further good luck but that’s the catch… only the clip can guarantee good luck. A lot may have worked out in SpongeBob’s favor but there are just as many instances where SpongeBob is on the receiving end of an absurd amount of bad luck. It really is something that fluctuates between every episode so calling it a surefire advantage may not be correct. Popeye’s luck meanwhile is far more consistent in its output, being a consistent reason for why enemies such as the Sea Hag could never defeat Popeye or why Popeye can always get spinach even when it’s stripped away from him. That’s not also mentioning the Whiffle Hen feather that he can keep in his pocket or the Whiffle Hen that he can potentially summon at any time. What really seals the deal however is that Popeye’s innate luck is so strong that it could bypass the Whiffle Hen’s absurd luck, allowing him to land a hit on Ham Gravy despite his previous showcase of being impossible to hit. SpongeBob’s only option is to rely on the magic conch shell to guide him out of proper danger but it’s not entirely likely for SpongeBob to use such an item mid-battle. SpongeBob’s luck ultimately becomes a non-factor for denying a wincon when Popeye can just outright ignore it.

What about either destroying the other’s spiritual forms? Well, they both do have the means to do so. SpongeBob’s got devices that can nullify ghost powers before trapping them and devices that erase ghosts from existence but Popeye has ghost grease that can completely erase ghosts. Neither would be completely inclined to rely on those items but they both can just as easily pull those items out of nowhere and use it on the other fairly easily. You could even argue that Popeye can outright ignore having his soul stolen due to being immune to the Sea Hag’s spell, and if it is erased, then Popeye can continue living life without it. Popeye can also manipulate one’s soul by punching it hard enough to transform them into a demonic soul, sending them straight into hell. It wouldn’t really matter with SpongeBob since he can likely escape hell but he can do that for some reason. Either way, they’d draw in how they get rid of ghosts, and the same can be said for the powers found in their ghostly forms. Both are intangible ghosts who can fly but SpongeBob could still use his powers along with the additional powers of possession and being able to take out the soul out of any inanimate object. Popeye meanwhile is a pure soul that can easily transmute and purify while in this form. SpongeBob would have the better versatility by default and possession could actually work on Popeye but the real question is if SpongeBob would actually resort to possession. When he’s turned into a ghost, he essentially doesn’t have the full knowhow of being a ghost. As we saw with Plankton in The Ghost of Plankton, you need experience with your ghostly powers in order to make the most out of your abilities. SpongeBob may not be completely dumb in battle but you’d be hard pressed to argue that he’d go for possession as an immediate option when he’s never done so in that form. Even if you argued that SpongeBob could summon the Flying Dutchman with his horn, he’d not only need the time to summon the Flying Dutchman but Popeye could also just outbrawl the Flying Dutchman before he can use an effective ability of his. A 2v1 would be difficult here given how versatile the Flying Dutchman is but Popeye is far more battle-smart than the Flying Dutchman’s ever been, plus he’s fought plenty of ghosts before and would know how much of a danger they are. This is all assuming that the Flying Dutchman would be on SpongeBob’s side to begin with as we see in the Search For Squarepants movie that he is willing to betray him for his own benefit. All in all, soul-based wincons are a no-go.

SpongeBob’s biggest advantages for this debate would have to be with his magic book. It’s got the ability to watch over any target of their choosing, warp reality to his whims by writing on its pages, and it can actively dictate the fate of whoever is written about. We haven’t seen SpongeBob use it to that extent but let’s assume that he would for debate’s sake. Popeye doesn’t have a blatant resistance to fate manipulation or clairvoyance so with the right moves, SpongeBob could potentially learn about the Source and write something in his magic book that will forcibly remove both from existence. It seems like a pretty clear win condition but there is one big issue with this. A lot of SpongeBob’s abilities would work if Popeye didn’t have an absurd resistance list. Using the magic book to warp reality? Negated by Popeye’s willpower which could overpower the Wish-O-Matic’s reality warping; magic bubbles and their ability to bring wishes into fruition are also resisted due to this. What about the knockout ray? Well, that’s negated by Popeye’s spinach. Orb of confusion? Resisted by Popeye’s resistance to the Smog. Utility belt? Popeye could resist or come back from all of the options we’ve seen. Paralysis through slime and the stunning conch? Resisted. The magic pencil eraser and eraser gun? Well, given that we don’t consider it to have regeneration negation, it's the kind of existence erasure that Popeye could outright ignore due to ignoring reality being turned off. Transmutation? Popeye can easily maintain consciousness and come back from it outright. Even if SpongeBob turned the whole universe into string to get rid of Popeye and the Source, there’s nothing to suggest that Popeye himself couldn’t come back from it and continue the fight.

Ultimately, there are only three things that Popeye can’t outright resist. SpongeBob could debatably use a burst of slime to nullify Popeye’s spinach power, rendering those abilities moot like how Clockwork could have the effects of his time powers nullified. SpongeBob’s trident could also achieve a similar effect, albeit it’s less unreliable given that SpongeBob can’t use the trident to its best ability. However, Popeye’s enraged form actively ignores power nullification and still gives Popeye all the strength, speed, and potential abilities that Popeye would gain with spinach. Meanwhile, Popeye’s spinach-powered punches (or spinach as a whole) can directly cancel out the powers of others, something that SpongeBob can’t directly ignore or resist. Clones can be dispelled, transformations are reversed, intangibility is cancelled out, etc. On a similar note, Popeye wouldn’t actually resist the temptation of eating a Krabby Patty but an issue arises in how Popeye would be affected. His established resistance to morality shifting would prevent the Krabby Patty from pacifying him, and while he could get addicted to Krabby Patties, the effects it causes aren’t too detrimental. If Popeye explodes into nothing from eating too many, he can just regenerate from it, and if eating too many Krabby Patties somehow weakens him, spinach will just put him back at full strength. Even then though, what is to say that Krabby Patties couldn’t just boost Popeye’s strength like how spinach could? SpongeBob’s used Krabby Patties to get a strength boost like how Popeye’s used spinach, and given that Popeye can easily boost his strength with plenty of foods outside of spinach, Krabby Patties can essentially do the same thing. Meanwhile SpongeBob can’t get as great of a boost if he ate Popeye’s spinach as he doesn’t have the kind of exposure that Popeye’s had with spinach for years.

All of this wouldn’t be an issue if SpongeBob could overcome Popeye’s love for spinach but nothing in SpongeBob’s kit can ultimately separate the two. Even if SpongeBob’s magic book worked and he tried to write a wish like “I wish Popeye can never eat spinach again”, Popeye’s resistance to narrative changes would overrule such a command. Having said everything in the verdict thus far however, what really puts the final nail in the coffin however is SpongeBob’s own vulnerabilities. SpongeBob has no answer to Popeye’s paralysis abilities, the damage that he can casually transfer into targets by hitting a separate target, or the relish of the gods that lets Popeye ascend to a higher dimension where he is untouchable for as long as he stays in that dimension. Granted, the last one is easily interceptable if SpongeBob just steals it for himself but the point is that SpongeBob’s defense has a lot more holes in it. Add on his common weakness of a lack of moisture and Popeye can eventually find a way to break through the sponge. SpongeBob’s best chance would be to wait out the time limit/feat limit of Popeye’s spinach power. That way, he can strike with an ability that base Popeye can’t resist, but despite this, Popeye’s immense luck will likely persist in most cases and give him the spinach needed to escape.

However, Popeye’s clearest wincon would have to be his transmutation punches since while normal punches are naturally resisted by the sponge, spinach-powered punches are one of the BIGGEST issues here. Being able to override a guy’s own transmutation resistance after eating spinach is one of the few cases where layered hax can apply, and since SpongeBob’s never resisted transmutation to that degree, coming into contact with a single one of these punches is a proper fight ender in Popeye’s favor. Meanwhile, SpongeBob’s clearest wincon could actually be the imagination box. Its requirement of a strong imagination could ultimately leave Popeye trapped there for good since he doesn’t have as great of an imagination as SpongeBob does. Sure, it does require Popeye to accidentally fall into the box for it to be effective but you can argue that Popeye’s other methods of leaving would still ultimately leave him trapped in its dimension like how it did with Squidward. Ultimately, the winner is dependent on A) how clearcut their wincons are, B) how great their resistances are to other wincons, and C) how often they would resort to said wincons in a proper fight. SpongeBob is undoubtedly skilled but he isn’t the smartest fighter around still as his naivety and tendency to be gullible prevents him from consistently being at his strongest. Even assuming that he is at his most confident and his most “locked-in”, Popeye generally just has a better track record and is willing to use his craziest stuff against danger. He may get beat up a lot at first before he resorts to spinach but even base Popeye is competent enough to stand his own ground.

SpongeBob has the capability to overcome Popeye and find a way to incapacitate him but it’s clear that Popeye has the better wincons all around.

Summary

Advantages:

  • Far more unpredictable in ability usage
  • Has the leg up on Popeye with better natural regeneration
  • Has better equipment overall
  • Could potentially wish away all of Popeye’s spinach…
  • The imagination box could work as a wincon

Equal:

  • Strength is comparable
  • Speed is comparable
  • A lot of their abilities cancel out
  • There are a whole slew of abilities that SpongeBob can resist
  • Both can restore their stamina whenever they want

Disadvantages:

  • Isn’t as great of a physical fighter as Popeye
  • Has no counters to some of Popeye’s wincons
  • …but it may be resisted/a non-issue with the other foods that Popeye can power up with
  • Generally will have a harder time in landing his wincons first
  • Still naive and gullible despite his resume of skill
  • Losing moisture is still a detrimental wincon to SpongeBob
  • Whatever is going on with Paramount

Advantages:

  • Is generally a better fighter overall
  • Can cancel out SpongeBob’s luck altogether and has more consistent good luck overall
  • Can keep fighting with enhanced power even if his spinach power is nullified
  • Resists a lot of SpongeBob’s major wincons
  • Popeye’s spinach-powered transmutation can override SpongeBob’s own transmutation resistance
  • Basically resists the majority of SpongeBob’s wincons

Equal:

  • Strength is comparable
  • Speed is comparable
  • A lot of their abilities cancel out
  • There are a whole slew of abilities that Popeye can resist
  • Both can restore their stamina whenever they want

Disadvantages:

  • Has less useful equipment
  • Popeye’s greatest regeneration feats are reliant on spinach
  • Would fall to the Krabby Patty’s temptation… which isn’t too detrimental
  • Sorry animated Popeye movie fans…


This was honestly a very difficult fight to figure out with how the majority of their kits can equal out or naturally counter the other. However, while both did have wincons, only one guy could beat the odds. For as many moving parts as this debate had, consistency was the most important factor here and as our ultimate conclusion, only one sailor had the capability to live long enough to put down the Bob for good.

He was strong to the finich, he ate all his spinach, and now, the winner is Popeye the Sailor Man!

Next Time…

Alright, that’s a wrap on wave 2! It’s been a fun wave overall and I’m definitely proud of how much my blogs have grown since wave 1. SpongeBob vs Popeye was an especially fun blog to work on but now, this blog’s got greater plans for its upcoming wave 3! Take a sneak peek at what’s to come in the future…

Sources

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